Sorry. I'm just bitten (or bit. Go figure with this left-to-right language :-)
I've invested a huge amount of effort studying NANT and learning how to build a command line CI environment. My goal was to solve the build issue once and for all so I'll be able to develop a few projects (web sites) and have them deployed "at the press of a button". So cool...
Then, trying to see the difference between Web Sites and Web Application (been there, done that, can never remember the difference) I stumble today upon Microsoft's Web Deployment tool MSDeploy, and now the Microsoft Web Platform.
So my question - Is this something completely new changing the rules of the development/deployment game, or is this just Microsotian Marketing Wrapper for ASP.Net etc. and I should stick with nAnt process and just integrate a different final step?
No. MSDEPLOY is a very rich deployment technology they've been working on for some time. It's available in VS2010 beta 1, I believe. I allows the deployment of the web application, including any databases it uses. It permits different versions of web.config to be used in a Debug deployment vs. a Release deployment, and much more.
The Microsoft Web Platform Installer is simply a packaging of a bunch of their server technologies. The idea was to have a single installer that installs everything.
I had not seen that Microsoft Web Platform site before. It looks like a packaging of the marketing around this stuff!
Related
In Visual Studio, I tried a project in both. But there appears to be no difference in the tools displayed in the tool box....
So what the real basic major difference.?
See these:
ASP.NET Web Site or ASP.NET Web Application?
Website is for internet based audience - in this case your concerns(security, etc) are different;
Web application is a software, just like a desktop application software, usually intended to be used for intranet environments. For instance, an HR software could be a web app - that is available on the intranet for all the departments to fill in their timesheets.
Though, a website may contain specific operations, tasks, or workflows.
Checkout: Web site project vs Web app project
WebSite project is compiled on the fly.
In a WebApplication, you need to build a page before you can debug.
However, WebApplication is the way to go, because with WebSite-project, you cannot create a setup project (and conversion from WebSite to WebApplication can lead to problems/bugs).
That's why I recommend WebApplication.
Simply put, a WebSite is worth nothing if the customer is too stupid to install it manually.
I have a good amount of knowledge in the ASP.NET Webforms and MVC worlds. Shortly I will be tasked with implementing custom web applications with Sharepoint. I have great flexibility with this project (i.e - I can use custom web apps outside of Sharepoint if that's possible) but like most projects the most limiting factor I have to deal with is time.
Here are some questions that come to mind:
Can I easily integrate a custom MVC project into Sharepoint 2010? What are the pros and cons if I can?
Same as #1 only with Webforms.
If #1 and #2 are not viable solutions, can I easily create custom web applications within the Sharepoint world? What will the learning curve be with my background?
I understand developers can now use Windows 7 to deliver Sharepoint 2010 solutions. It looks like I can use a trial of Microsoft Sharepoint Foundations 2010. If that's correct, are there any development differences or gotchas I need to be aware of before digging into the Foundation version? I don't want to get up to speed on Foundation and then find out that the Server edition (the version that will be deployed) is vastly different.
Thanks!
SharePoint is based on webforms - it is relatively easy to add custom user controls and web parts, though if you want to use SharePoint data in a completely custom web app, especially mvc you will probably need to host it seperately - you can access everything you need through the SharePoint API, but it makes the deployment a lot more complicated.
The workarounds to get webforms mvc running in the SharePoint web app tend to involve stuff that would never get past corporate infrastructure people, but I've been getting good results with precompiled razor views set up based on http://razorengine.codeplex.com/ - my version that produces code which can be included in a SharePoint project is at https://github.com/tqc/RazorEngine
In the 2007 version there were significant architectural differences between WSS and MOSS. With 2010 there aren't as many differences, so you should be ok, but it would still be better to develop on the same version you are deploying to - download a trial of Standard or one of the demo VMs - If you do a lot of .net development, chances are you already have an appropriate dev license.
What are you trying to accomplish? Are you connecting your MVC site to SharePoint or are you building something "MVC" on top of the SharePoint server?
In any case, there is an MVC SharePoint project on Codeplex here http://sharepointmvc.codeplex.com/
Here is an article on the subject http://blogs.msdn.com/tom/archive/2009/03/17/asp-net-mvc-and-sharepoint.aspx
I havent touched it, and it seems a bit abandoned to me, but it might get you along.
Check out it outlines one method of running MVC with SharePoint
Generally, SharePoint will simplify many user-oriented requirements you may have - such as authentication, permissions control and personalised areas (with MySites).
If you go with SharePoint, you almost have to build your product for SharePoint Foundation so that you can keep your customers' total costs low (SharePoint CALs, SQL Server, hardware, etc). You'll want to build friendly user interfaces for managing permission, allowing your users to create their own pages, and other provisioning tasks -- or provide rock-solid documentation on how to do it out of the box with SharePoint. With SharePoint, you should use features and Web Parts to deploy your code either way , whether SaaS or on-premise. That will make it easier to deploy and upgrade.
I need to implement a web site installer for my asp.net application. The installer will be handling following features -
Deploy the .net web application on to the IIS server
Setting up the Sql database connection to run the DB scripts.
Execute all the DB scripts.
Run another exe for the license management.
If some thing goes wrong, need to rollback everything.
I have heard about wix and install shield and wondering what would be the best technology suitable for this particular case.
Thanks Thurein
MSDeploy does all this and more. Find it over on www.iis.net.
-Oisin
WIX has the advantage of being very flexible and free. It also has a somewhat steep learning curve. If you are going to be doing something like this frequently however, it is certainly worth the investment.
After that, there are any number of commercial options to choose from, i.e InstallShield.
I'm trying to start on a new project to help enrich my asp.net knowledge, since I'm not completely satisfied with what my class is teaching me. From my (very little) experience with Rails, I recall every application containing its own development web server. Say I were trying to create a local-only application, but I want it to run in a web browser (Therefore ASP.Net). Are there any options in terms of being able to distribute an application and have it launch its own, or just not require IIS/VS/Apache-mono?
You may want to look into aspNETserve. It sounds like it would fit your needs. I haven't worked on it recently, so it probably has some rough edges.
On the plus side its all open source, and if you are just getting started with ASP.NET it would be a real eye opener on how the internals of the ASP.NET lifecycle operate.
The simple answer is that you need a web server to run the application. It cannot run without one.
If we're talking demo purposes or you don't require that many features of a web server there are redistributable web-servers that you can include with your setup package.
Like Alex mentioned the most popular one seems to be Cassini.
I'm assuming that you want to run the site on the same machine you are developing it on.
Visual Studio 2005 and up allows you to run the site from VS itself if you want to view it locally on your development machine.
To my understanding Visual Web Developer allows you to do the same as well.
Visual Web Developer
You can use the cassini web server. Please note that those are different redistributable:
http://www.asp.net/Downloads/archived/cassini/
http://ultidev.com/products/Cassini/
I'm not really certain why you would want to develop a web application (with all the difficulties it entails, due to the fact that you are dealing with a stateless connection to an unknown client machine), but then run the entire thing on the client machine.
Surely it makes more sense to develop a WinForms application?
Follow this guide to setup IIS on your PC to run ASP.NET apps:
http://www.geekpedia.com/tutorial25_Setting-up-your-ASPNET-server-IIS.html
I'm trying to create a standard way of rolling out web applications for our company. Currently we do it with zip files, vbscript/javascript, and manual some steps.
For thick client installs we generate MSI installers using Wise/Wix. We don't create installers currently for websites as in general they are just xcopy deploy. However we have some config files that need to be changed, verify that certain handlers are registered in IIS... The list goes on.
Do most people use MSI installers for web applications as well, or some other tool/scripting language?
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?
Do consider MSDeploy, that is the direction Microsoft will be investing in the future for deployment of web applications...
Know more about the future direction at Overview Post for Web Deployment in VS 2010
We have been using FinalBuilder (www.finalbuilder.com) for this purpose for long time and for some time also using InstallAce (www.Installace.com) for build deployment on the Web Farm.
You may want to look at:
How do I get a deployable output from a build script with ASP.NET
Step by Step ASP.NET Automated Build/Deploy
We use MSI to create basic installers for our web projects too, often using the Web Setup Projects in VS and sometimes completely custom installers. You may also want to look at MSDeploy.
We're moving to an MSI for our installs, so far with mixed results. I'm a control freak so I would personally prefer a series of scripts that I had more direct control over. I've used ANT in the past with good results.
Have you checked out NAnt and CruiseControl?
Combined, they can provide an easy and automated way to build and deploy your web apps.
I work for a state agency and we do all our deployments using a product called RepliWeb.
It works good because as dev's we have no control over the webservers. But we can deploy to a deployment area and run the RepliWeb job to do the deployment. Not sure on pricing though...