I want to know if there is any addin to synchronize files with a remote server (like a file upload (FTP) for deployment). (in a Website)
Something that can identify the files I change and check them for a later upload.
Is there an addin for that?
That sounds remarkably like source control to me... and there are lots of source control add-ins for Visual Studio.
Even if you don't really want the full power of source control, it can be a pretty simple way of syncing with another machine... in fact, that's how I end up "deploying" to csharpindepth.com - I check everything into a repository on the server, and a hook updates the web site directory.
You are probably looking for something like this. Dispatch is pretty good indeed, but it´s not a free alternative.
If you are talking about just file syncing and not source control, then Microsoft's Live Mesh is the tool for you. It will sync files across whatever devices you want - quite handy if you need to take work home with you but don't have remote access to your source control (or you do but don't want to be checking in stuff that is still WIP).
Note that it isn't a VS plugin, it operates separately and watches for file system changes.
What do you mean by synchronize files? Synchronize with what?
If you mean with a repository, then ankhsvn is one such add-in that works with subversion.
If you mean with the deployment location then clickonce is built-in and manages file versioning on the server whenever you click 'publish'.
edit>
ClickOnce calculates all necessary dependencies for the project. Additionally, you can click the 'application files' button in the publish tab of project config and select 'show all files'. For each file you can mark them as:
include: They'll be deployed with the project
Pre-requisites: they must be on the system at the time of installation/deployment
Exclude: Don't deploy them
Likewise, the pre-requisites button allows you to ensure that certain application dependencies are present (framework version, sql server is installed, etc.).
AnkhSVN http://ankhsvn.open.collab.net/ is an integrated Subversion interface and as with all version control systems you can check in code (and other files as well). I would recommend something of that nature unless you synchronization files are not project related, in which case I recommend pretty much any of the file synchronization utilities that are available out there. I'm partial to Delta Copy http://www.aboutmyip.com/AboutMyXApp/DeltaCopy.jsp for general purpose file copies.
Related
I have always used the express versions of Visual Studio for my Asp.Net projects. In the past, I would use a basic FTP synchronizer to push updated files (*.vb) to our server, then the changes would just show up on the website instantly. Now, for some reason, when I make changes to our *.vb files, they are not being reflected on the server after I synchronize over ftp, unless I build the project first. In addition, for our .Net 4.0 project, VS 2015 14.0.23107 is adding the following directories, with tons of stuff inside of them:
/.vs
/My Project
/Obj
There are loads of files within these directories which I have no idea what they do, and for some reason our project has taken on a completely different behavior. Now when we try to synchronize over FTP, there are a ton more files, and it seems that changing the actual underlying source doesn't work. We have to synchronize all the other files in the above directories, then we can see the changes.
Is this a new way they are doing things, or is this because VS is now free and we are getting a better version where we have to "publish" not "synchronize?"
Is there a way to go back to the simple way of doing things, where we just have a plain directory with our source files and sync them over to the server? Should we not do it this way? If not, what method should we be using and what files should we be pushing to the server?
I'll just promote my comment to an answer. There are several aspects of this question:
Use publish, this feature is already for long available in Visual Studio and works well. There is plenty of ways to customize it and it supports a lot of technologies, including FTP. It's also more convenient, systematic and reliable way of deployment than manually copying files to your FTP. You can also share your publishing configuration among developers and store several of them. No loss here.
I don't quite get why would you like to copy the source (.vb) files to the server. What you would usually like to achieve is to get compiled DLL's + resources copied to your server, and source files 'secure' on developers machines. You can compile your sources on the server if you really need it, but then just plug it into a source control, use ms build etc. Anyway, build/publish actions are there to prepare the deployment files for you, manual copying is pure bad.
For the new folders:
Obj is everything but new, its created to store some resources, crap, more here: What is obj folder generated for?
.vs stores user specific settings, and you should ignore it as well as obj folder, more here:
Should I add the Visual Studio 2015 .vs folder to source control?
My Project is most likely your own folder, nothing related to VS.
To sum up, as long as you use asp 4, 4.5 nothing changes. Only the 5.0 intruduces a bit different rules for deployment. Most of the problems you get are easily solved using the right tools (Publish). It will know what files to ship (binaries + resources included in project) and what to ignore (source files, caches, crap). It's convenient, less error-prone and can do much more for you.
Definitely, use "Publish" option (right click on your web application at solution explorer, under Run/Build options), thus you can update your server site with those files created on Publish. As Mikus mentioned, you DON'T need vb files on your published site, you just need dll's and resources (images, js, css, resx, e.g.).
Regards, hope it helps.
Use the Publish Option which is provided by Visual Studio.
This will compile your project and you can then host this in your reliant manner.
I personally host on IIS and considering I have no data stored locally I can publish directly to the published path on the IIS Server.
The Publish tool is very simple and only takes a few minutes.
I have a solution with a fair few projects, 3 of them web-based (WCF in IIS / MVC site). When the solution builds, it dumps each of the components of this distributed system in a 'Build' folder. Running the 'configurator' part of the whole output will set up the system in the cloud automatically. It's very neat :) However, the Web Deploy Projects are a major pain. They "build" (i.e. deploy) every, single, time I build - even when no changes have been made to their respective projects.
Changed a single line of code? Look forward to waiting around a minute for the 3 web projects to redeploy.
[These projects are VERY straightforward at the moment - two have a single .svc and one .ashx file - the other is an MVC app with ~5 views]
I realise I can change solution configurations to not 'build' them, but I've been doing that and it's very easy to log on the next day and forget about it, and spend a couple of hours tracking down bugs in distributed systems due to something simply having not been built.
Why I use Web Deploy Projects? Well, because I need all pages + binaries from the web project. The build output for the project itself is the 'bin' folder, so no pages. The entire project folder? It has .cs, .csproj and other files I don't want included.
This will be building on build servers eventually, but it's local at the moment. But I want a quick way of getting the actual output files from the web project to my target folder. Any ideas?
Not sure if this will help in your situation, (plug for own project coming up), but I am working on a project to help ease IIS deployments:
https://github.com/twistedtwig/AutomatedDeployments
The idea being you can use config files for IIS (app Pool, applications and websites) to automate the creation and update of sites locally (dev machines) or remotely (test and production machines).
It is still a work in progress but is ready to be used in production systems.
using the package creation as a post build step might get you closer to what you want, (don't believe it includes all the extra files), but that would still build it each time, (although if code hasn't changed it should not rebuild unless you choose rebuild all projects).
In the end I created a utility/tool which, given a project file, XCOPYies the project folder for the web project to a target location, then looks in said project file and deletes anything that doesn't have Build Action set to Content. Very quick and effective.
I know it is still in RC but VS2012 does have a neat feature when doing publish that it detects the changes and publishes only those. Might be something a little deeper down in the build where it does an automatic publish too.
You can take a look to the Octopus project: http://octopusdeploy.com/
Deployment based on nuget packages.
Is it possible to exclude a folder in a web project from being published? We've got some documentation and scripts that included in a particular project folder, and are added to the project, but when I do a VS publish, I don't want them to go up to the production server.
I know they shouldn't be in the project, but I thought I'd find a workaround before I try to convince the owner to modify the way he's doing things.
Old question, but I found if I mark the folder as hidden in Windows Explorer, it doesn't show/publish in your solution.
This is good for example to stop original photoshop images being included in uploads which aren't used and are big. Anything more complex though you'll probably want to write your own publish tool.
This doesn't answer your question, exactly, but my feeling is that unless you are a single developer publishing to a server, you would be better off doing builds on a dedicated workstation or server using MSBuild (or some other building and deploying solution) directly (and thereby would be able to very granularly control what goes up to production). MSBuild can not only build, but using some extensions (including open source types), it can also deploy. Microsoft has a product called MSDeploy in beta, and that might be an even better choice, but having no experience with it, I cannot say for certain.
In our situation, we have a virtual workstation as a build box, and all we have to do is double click on the batch file that starts up an MSBuild project. It labels all code using VSS, gets latest version, builds the solution, and then deploys it to both servers. We deploy exactly what we want to deploy and nothing more. We're quite happy with it.
The only downside, if it could be considered a downside, is that at least one of us had to learn how to use MSBuild. VS itself uses MSBuild.
For the files you don't want to go, loop at the properties and set the 'Copy to Output Directory' to 'Do not copy'
This option is not available for directories, however.
Can you not exclude them from the project through visual studio to stop them being published. They will the still exist in the filesystem
The only way that you can do this to my knowledge would be to exclude it from the project, do the publish, then re-include it in the project. That can be an issue.
There are probably much better ways to solve this problem but when we publish a build for our dev servers, we'll run a batch file when the build is complete to remove the un-needed folders and web.configs (so we don't override the ones that are already deployed).
According to http://www.mahingupta.com/mahingupta/blog/post/2009/12/04/AspNet-website-Exclude-folder-from-compilation.aspx you can just give the folder the "hidden" attribute in windows explorer and it won't publish. I tested this and it works for me.
Seems like a straightforward solution for quick and dirty purposes, but I don't think it will carry through our version control (mercurial).
Select all the files that should not be published.
Go to Properties
Set
Build Action -> None
Have to repeat the process for each sub-directory.
Here's our problem, we are a Flex shop that uses .NET for the server side logic. We use subversion for our source control and subeclipse in Flex Builder but are still quite new to using source control let alone subversion. Branching and merging seems to work very well on the .NET side but we are running into issues on the Flex side because of the final swf being built on our local machine.
The question is, what does a usual workflow look like for working with Flex and SVN? Particularly, how do you branch and where do you build?
Personally, I keep the Flash/Flex source code in a separate SVN repository that is away from what is deployed to any sort of web server. That way I can create branches and tags specifically for my Flash/Flex application. I also tend to publish any SWF's directly into my local copy of the deployment repository. It does not make sense to me to keep a published SWF under version control unless its part of the what is deployed to the server. I don't like to keep committing an SWF into my Flash source code repository because it takes up unnecessary space and all the source code should represent the latest version, not the resulting SWF.
You'd probably want to branch your project alongside your .Net project so your flex releases are consistent with your server logic.
We use a directory structure like this
+server-side-app
--trunk
--tags
--branches
+flex-client-app
--trunk
--tags
--branches
I would recommend something like that for yourself.
I agree with Matt W. At AKQA we have svn locations four our source and assets. We set up an svn ignore for the bin folders of a project. That way we aren't checking any swfs which means when we update we don't get someone elses swfs or output files.
A good bet is to look into continuous integration with something like cruise control. We build our output on the server which generates all of the files into one location on the server. There are loads of other benefits of continous integration and it's well worth having
Right now I'm working with an ASP.NET website that automatically generates images and stores them in a temporary folder. When working on my local system these go going into a temporary folder that gets picked up by Visual Source Safe which then wants to check them in. As such, I am wondering if there is a way to just exclude that particular folder from source control?
I've done a bit of reading and found that there are ways to do this for individual files, but I haven't found anything yet about an entire folder.
I think you've found one of the main reasons MS went back to projects in VS2008 and in MVC.
It's been a long time since I've used VSS (mainly because it's really out of date now), but most source providers let you exclude files and folders as a setting of the provider, rather than the project under control.
If you can switch to a Web Project rather than a WebSite then do so, otherwise I'd look at updating your source control provider, as this sort of exclusion is easy with Vault, CSV, SVN, Git, VSTS and so on (to name but a few).
Are you using ASP.NET Website or ASP.NET Web Project? The difference is significant enough to solve or promote this problem.
Websites, love to scan the file system and auto checkin.
Projects, checkin only what you tell them to.
Also Visual Source Safe is pretty out dated, most recent source control systems allow you to do what you are asking. SVN and TFS 2008 SP1 do from my experience.
You can also try to right click and pick "Exclude" on the folder, but in the case of a Website I believe this renames the folder.
I'm not sure if this is an option for you, but if you exclude your temporary folder from VSS (delete the folder inside VSS using the VSS UI), the files that go into it should not get "picked up" again.
If you perform operations on a parent project of the temporary folder, you may try cloaking the folder.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/x2398bf5(VS.80).aspx
I would suggest emptying/deleting your folder from your website. Have your website on startup create/verify the folder, and on shutdown to clean it up and remove anything in it. This can be DEBUG code only (wrap in #if DEBUG) if so needed. Also add a build script to your project that does this every time it is built also.
Could you just make your application write to a temporary folder that is outside of your website?
e.g. in C:\tempfiles
VSS shouldn't be able to pick it up then.