During our development of schemas orchestrations, ports, etc. We've been exporting MSI's and binding files for deployment into our test and ultimately production environment
So, for example, we set up a series of receive ports/locations in a single BizTalk app, for the purpose of receiving all HL7 v2 messages from our HCIS. We then exported that to a bindings file, and imported into test.
Then, as we developed new schemas, we exported each schema into it's own msi file and deployed that into the same BizTalk application in our test environment. We did that because the schemas are specific to the inbound messages from our HCIS.
So now, in test, we've ended up with a BizTalk application with the receive ports and schemas we need to receive messages from our HCIS. The issue I discovered is that, if I look at the installed programs list in the control panel, I only see 1 application. So if I want to uninstall and re-install a particular schema, I'm not sure what will happen. For some reason, I half expected to see an entry for every msi I installed, but I suppose that because they're all going into the same BizTalk application, they are all registered in windows as the same application. I'm betting there is a better way to do this, any suggestions?
You can, and probably should, create different applications for each logical grouping of code. If you examine the 'deploy' section of the project properties you'll see a text box to enter your application name. When you trigger a deploy they will be placed into a separate application with the name you provide. You'll see it in the BizTalk management console.
We deploy to dev using the framework mentioned below. Then to deploy to QA right click on the application and create an MSI from that point. It will allow creating an MSI for only one application.
NOTE: the deploy setting is NOT saved globally. If another developer opens the project his project will not inherit the application name you've set.
We use the biztalk deployment framework to help manage changes when we do development.
So now, in test, we've ended up with a BizTalk application with the receive ports and schemas we need to receive messages from our HCIS. The issue I discovered is that, if I look at the installed programs list in the control panel, I only see 1 application.
I can only think of two scenarios where you might observe this behaviour:
You have multiple different MSI's (once for each schema) which you are importing into BizTalk (and hence they are appearing in the BizTalk Admin Console), but you are not running the MSI on the local machine (and so it is not appearing in 'Installed Programs'); or
You MSI's are all named the same, in which case after the import into BizTalk and the local install, you only have a single program visible in 'Installed Programs'.
I'm betting there is a better way to do this, any suggestions?
With regards to approach, you are certainly along the correct lines. I tend to advise clients to group logical artifacts into a single logical bucket - either project or Application - that can be deployed (and redeployed) without affecting other parts of the system.
In a HL7 scenario, one logical bucket might be Patient artifacts (schemas and supporting maps) and a second may be Financial artifacts (schemas and supporting maps). These logical buckets can either be deployed to different BizTalk Applications, or the same BizTalk Application depending on your requirements. However, the main benefit here is that they are separate and therefore all artifacts do not need to be redeployed if you need to make a small modification to A19 - Patient Query/Response schema for example.
How to deploy is another question entirely. I'm a massive fan of MSBuild and have written comprehensive build scripts that I tweak and reuse for each project I work on. These deployment scripts will tear down an existing environment and re-build from the ground-up, creaing Applications, deploying Resources, importing Bindings, creating Hosts and Host Instances etc. before finally starting the application. This approach removes all human error from the process and tends to be favoured by clients who often have their infrastructure teams perform the deployment rather than their development teams.
I notice that Jay mentioned the use of the BizTalk Deployment Framework. I personally struggle with this tool, partly because I need to maintain my configuration in Excel which I can't check in to source control easily.
Related
I am working on a ASP.net MVC4 project where a same project needs to be deployed to many clients on daily basis, each client will have its own domain / sub domain and a separate app pool and db (MSSSQL).
Doing each deployment manually could take at least 1-2 hours if everything goes well. Is there anyway using which I can do this in some automated way?
Moreover, we also need to update all of the apps when a new version is released.. may be one by one or all of them at same time. However, doing this manually could take weeks and once we have more clients then it will not possible doing this update manually.
The update involves, suspending app for some time, taking a full backup of files and db, update application code/ files in app folder, upgrade db with a script and then start app, doing some diagnosis script to check if update was successful or not, if not we need to check what went wrong?
How can we automate this updates? Any idea would be great on how to approach this issue.
As a developer for BuildMaster, I can say that this scenario, known as the "Core Version" pattern, is a common one. If you're OK with a paid solution, you can setup your deployment plans within the tool that do exactly what you described.
As a more concrete example, we experience this exact situation in a slightly different way. BuildMaster has a set of 60+ extensions that rely on a specific SDK version. In our recent 4.0 release, we had to re-deploy every extension because of breaking API changes within the SDK. This is essentially equivalent to having a bunch of customers and deploying to them all at once. We have set up our deployment plans such that any time we create a new release of the SDK application, we have the option to set a variable that says to build every extension that relies on the SDK:
In BuildMaster, the idea is to promote a build (i.e. an immutable object that travels through various environments like Dev, Test, Staging, Prod) to its final environment (where it becomes the deployed build for the release). In your case, this would be pushing your MVC application to its final environment, and that would then trigger the deployments of all dependent applications (i.e. your customers' instances of your application). For our SDK, the plan looks like this:
For your scenario, you would only need the single action, "Promote Build". As I mentioned before, any dependents would then be promoted to their final environments, so all your customer deployments would kick off once that action is run during deployment. As an example, our Azure extension's deployment plan for its final environment looks like this (internal URLs redacted):
You may have noticed that these plans are marked "Shared", which means every extension we have has the exact same deployment plan, but utilizes different variables to handle the minor differences like names, paths, etc.
Since this is such an enormous topic I could go on for ages, but I think that should be sufficient for your use-case if you wanted to try it out.
There are others but you could setup Team Server Foundation to deploy automated builds.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff650529.aspx
I find the easiest way to do this from an MVC project is to create a publish profile.
This is done by right-clicking your project selecting publish and then configuring it to your needs.
Then from TFS you create a new build definition, this kicks of a wizard which takes you through it.
There are quite a few options which would be too long to go into for every scenario.
The main change I usually find the most important is to set an MSBuild Argument to deploy with the publish profile.
This can be found at Process > Advanced > MSBuild Arguments.
Once this is configured correctly it's a simple case of right-clicking and queue new build to build and deploy.
You wil need different PublishProfile/Build configuration per deployment environment.
For backups I use a powershell script which can be called manually or from TFS.
You also have a drop folder in TFS which keeps a backup of x many releases.
The datbases are automatically configured via Sql server to backup, TBH I didn't set that up it was a DB admin guy who is also involved with releases.
From a dev testing side I use jMeter (http://jmeter.apache.org/) to run some automated scripts that check that users can login and view certain screens, just to confirm nothing major has gone wrong. However there is usually a testing team to run more detailed tests, again not setup by me.
All of the above will probably take you sometime to setup but in the long run it will literally save you weeks of time over a year.
A free alternative to TFS is http://www.cruisecontrolnet.org/, I have used this in the past too and is pretty good.
You can automate your .Net deployments with Beanstalk, which will give you a way to trigger deployments with a single click, watch progress, manage permissions and see history of deployments. Check out this guide on the topic:
http://guides.beanstalkapp.com/deployments/deploy-dotnet.html
I hope you will find it useful.
P.S. - I work at Beanstalk.
How can I automate the web-application build process, that includes following steps:
Change connection string.
Recreate database by scripts.
Deploy web-site by ftp.
Copy some files to server in addition to application.
And may be perform some initialize operations.
Should I write any script/programm, use Visual Studio or any another program?
Personally I use a Continuous Integration tool to do this kind of work.
The one I mainly use is Team City by JetBrains.
This kind of software can look at your Source Control repo for new checking, perform builds, publish builds to servers as well as running pre/post build events.
You've to start learning MSBuild. It is VERY simple and straightforward, so just start and you'll see ;)
In adddition to built in features it has Community Pack with many tasty things so you will be able to:
Replace connection string in config file using regex or replace whole config with predefined connection string (FileUpdate or Copy task)
Execute database scripts (MSBuild.Community.Tasks.SqlServer.ExecuteDDL)
Deploy site using Copy task
And many other...
You can run pre and post events in Visual Studio. To do this, simply right click on the project and in the project properties navigate to the 'Build Events' options. Here you can specify the pre and post build events (you can also specify when the event runs - on successful build or otherwise).
Once the project has been successfully built, the post build event can be set up to perform the tasks specified. You can detail the steps either in a separate file or in Visual Studio project's build events itself.
More information
Pre/Post Build event command line arguments
How to: Specify Build Events (C#)
Much along the continuous integration concept Jamie mentions, we use BuildMaster internally for all of our applications since we develop it :)
Now that we have a version offered for free, I'll share some thoughts on each of your bullet points:
Change connection string
This is something that is handled uniquely by the tool. Each environment would get its own "instance" of a configuration file and in a deployment plan you can use the "deploy configuration files" action to put them in any environment. This means there are no transforms to worry about since the config file is stored and versioned within the tool.
Recreate database by scripts
This is another major feature we have. Object code (stored procs, views, etc.) can be run every time with a DROP/CREATE combo, but adding indexes, dropping columns, can only be done once (you can't bring a column's data back without a restore!)
BuildMaster handles these types of change scripts differently - they can only be run at most once against an environment's instance of your database. This makes it super easy to bring any new or existing initialized database schema up-to-date.
Deploy web-site by FTP
Just add an action to your deployment plan, and you click Create Build or Promote Build, it will do that.
Copy some files to server in addition to application
If the process is repeatable you can do this easily, if need be by using a manual action that will remind you to do it.
And may be perform some initialize operations
This sounds like a "change control" to me, a one-time change when you release. We support these as well but not in the free version unfortunately.
We have multiple BizTalk 2006 application servers, and I find it almost impossible to keep the versions of our projects in sync on them. It's a tedious process of deploying the MSI packages, importing them, matching up files in the GAC, deploying some registry changes, and if one step is missed or somebody deployed an updated copy of a DLL directly to one server and not another, there's no easy way to tell.
How do others ensure that copies of software between the two servers are the same version?
Some Background:
Our environment has two (non-clustered) BizTalk front end servers and a separate database back-end. Until recently, though we had both front-ends configured, the host instances were stopped on the second server because of some troubleshooting. They've been disabled for a few months, and we're deployed some updated code in the meantime.
This morning, I did a folder diff on the GAC, as well as the folder that holds the local disk copy of the DLLs for our deployed project (C:\OurProject\ on both servers), and everything matched - same file sizes, same timestamps. However, once I turned on the second set of services, it became obvious that Server2 was using an old version of the project DLL - of the next three files processed, two had normal results and one was clearly out of date.
Please help me avoid an aneurysm.
One thing you may want to look into is the BizTalk Deployment Framework.
We are currently building up a new environment with BizTalk 2009 and I started out with a set of MSBuild scripts that handle exporting sources from SubVersion, building and deploying assemblies using BTSTask.
Of course BTSTask lacks a lot of functionality (start/stop applications) but at least for BizTalk 2006 there is BTSControl.
We use an automated build script whose ultimate end is an MSI with binding files for Dev/Stage/Prod. All released binding files are stored on a share and used to load the BizTalk server by hand. First the App is stopped, MSI's executed on both servers and then MSI imported. During the import, we specify the environment for the bindings and voila. We've had no issues with loss of synch.
So, I'd suggest taking all of your latest MSIs and re-execute them on the servers where you have differences. Otherwise, just try to put a process in place to create a repeatable load process by hand.
I am still learning BizTalk and EDI. When I originally started at my current company I inherited my predecessor's computer, so a lot of configuration was already in place. I recently got a new laptop, and have almost finished configuring the new development environment. There was no documentation on how to setup a dev environment before I got here (I have created such a document which has gotten rather lengthy).
The last piece I can't seem to figure out is the EdiRecieve and SendEdi ports. They are on my old dev environment but they do not appear on my new one. From what I have been able to turn up Google dumpster diving, they exist in the Microsoft.BizTalk.Edi.EdiPipelines but do not appear to be installed by default. My question is how do I get these in my primary BizTalk application I use for development?
Another sideline, there is a BizTalk EDI Application that is apparently installed by default that does have the pipelines I am looking for. Do I need to reference that application or something somehow?
I tried GAC'ing the dlls, but that hasn't seemed to work.
You need to add a reference to the EDI application. To do this follow the steps below (taken from MSDN( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb226366(BTS.10).aspx))
In the BizTalk Server Administration Console, under the Applications node, right-click the application that you want to use for EDI, such as BizTalk Application 1. Point to Add, and then click References.
Select BizTalk EDI Application, and then click OK.
You can also use the EDI components that make up the pipelines (e.g. the EDIDissambler) in your own custom pipelines, you are not limited to just the out of the box pipelines - this is a very handy thing to know that it took me a while to realise.
Seems like there are so many different ways of automating one's build/deployment that it becomes difficult to parse through all the different scenarios that people support in tutorials on the web. So I wanted to present the question to the stackoverflow crowd ... what would be the best way to set up an automated build and deployment system using the following configuration:
Visual Studio 2008
Web Application Project
CruiseControl.NET
One of the first things I tried was to have CCnet automatically zip the output and copy it to the server, but then that requires manual work to unzip at the destination. However, if we try to copy all the files individually, then it could potentially take a long time if it's a large application (build server lives outside of the datacenter in our office ... I know).
Also of particular interest is how we would support multiple environments as we have dev, qa, uat, and then of course prod.
MSDeploy seems really interesting, but unless I'm interpreting the literature incorrectly, doesn't help in the scenario of deploying from the output of a build server. If anything, it seems like it'll be useful in deploying one build across a build farm ... but even for deploying from one environment to another, one would have to manually change config settings and web service URLs, etc.
I recently spent a few days working on automating deployments at my company.
We use a combination of CruiseControl, NAnt, MSBuild to generate a release version of the app. Then a separate script uses MSDeploy and XCopy to backup the live site and transfer the new files over.
Our solution is briefly described in an answer to this question Automate Deployment for Web Applications?
You might be interested in MSDeploy. Here's a Scott Hanselman post on this. It's only available as a technical preview at the moment (September 2008) but is worth evaluating against your requirements.
There is another new build tool (a very intelligent wrapper) called NUBuild. Its lightweight, open source and extremely easy to setup and provides almost no-touch maintenance. I really like this new tool and we have made it standard tool for our continuous build and integration process of our projects (we have about 400 projects across 75 developers). Try it out.
http://nubuild.codeplex.com/
Easy to use command line interface
Ability to target all .Net framework
version i.e. 1.1, 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5
Supports XML based configuration
Supports both project and file
references
Automatically generates the “complete
ordered build list” for a given
project – No touch maintenance.
Ability to detect and display
circular dependencies
Perform parallel build -
automatically decides which of the
projects in the generated build list
can be built independently.
Ability to handle proxy assemblies
Provides visual clue to the build
process e.g. showing “% completed”,
“current status” etc.
Generates detailed execution log both
in XML and text format
Easily integrated with
Cruise-Control.Net continuous
integration system
Can use custom logger like XMLLogger
when targeting 2.0 + version
Ability to parse error logs
Ability to deploy built assemblies to
user specified location
Ability to synchronize source code
with source-control system
Version management capability
Do you have the ability to run commands remotely? The PsExec utility from Systinternals would let run a command line unzip program on the remote machine. If you have a script that copies the build as a .zip file to the remote site, you would just need one more line for the PsExec call to unzip the files.
I had a related question about getting a deployable set of files from an automated build. I found Web Deployment Projects (links and all in the old question) did what I needed - they're a VS and MSBuild add-on.
This is a common problem (and I wish I had read it sooner) for all development, not just ASP.NET. Being one of its developers, my team naturally uses BuildMaster internally for the entire release process, and for most scenarios it's free. Within the tool, we are able to perform all the standard CI builds to create artifacts and then set up an automation process to deploy these artifacts to any one of the 40+ servers we have internally or externally hosted, depending on the specific application or environment.
Since you specifically mentioned deployment to different testing environments, this is a fundamental aspect of the tool. The idea is to model the environment workflow (e.g. Integration -> QA -> Production) you already have in place and essentially promote a build all the way from source control to production. Most times, it's as simple as adding a deployment action that deploys an artifact to the environment, other times it can be much more complex.
You also casually mentioned configuration file changes are part of deployment, which is another built-in component to BuildMaster. The idea we had was to use the tool itself as the central hub for all configuration files and deployments, thus ensuring the latest changes are applied automatically with a simple "deploy configuration files" action in your deployment plan.
One thing you didn't mention with regard to this process is the database deployment aspect. Most ASP.NET applications require an associated database, otherwise they could just be static HTML files. It is crucial that the database schema gets updated to the appropriate database version with every deployment. There is, not surprisingly, a module within BuildMaster that handles this for you as well. The idea is to store DDL-DML scripts within the tool itself, and by executing scripts only once per environment, it ensures that all of your databases across each environment are up-to-date as your builds are deployed through them. Other scripts (e.g. stored procedures, views, triggers, etc.) are essentially code files and therefore belong in source control. These DROP-CREATE-CONFIGURE type scripts can be run each and every time in most cases with a simple deployment action.
Another piece of the deployment puzzle that most developers do not think about is process automation. Many developers need to perform sign-offs or fill out change request forms in order to manually perform these processes. Again, this is all available as part of the automated workflow setup within BuildMaster. You can setup blockers that do not allow promotion to say the QA environment unless all unit tests have passed, or block promotion to the Staging environment unless someone from the QA team approves the build and all issues in your issue tracking tool are resolved/closed for that particular release.
While I realize I left out CC.NET from the answer, our applications are all built and deployed through BuildMaster so we no longer need it, though we could however just as easily pickup the artifacts from a drop location and deploy them in later environments.
I see that many people use CC for their .NET projects, but why not use Jenkins, Sonarqube? They got all you need. I setup all this in 3 days. I have a Win 2008 server R2, MSSQL, Jenkins, VIsual SVN and Sonarqube.
It all works great and u get all metrics on your project. Sonarqube uses Gallio, Gendarme, FXcop, Stylecop, NDepths and PartCover to get your metrics and all this is pretty straight forward since SonarQube do this automatically without much configuration.
i post som pictures for u too get a feeling for it. Here is Jenkins witch builds and get Sonar metrics and a another job for deploying automatically to IIS
And Sonarqube, all metrics for my project. This is a simple MVC4 app, but it works great!:
If you want more information i can be more specific but i think you should at least consider jenkins. If CC suites you better, at least you looked at good alternative before you chose.
This whole setup uses MSBuild, too build and deploy the apps.