Does anyone have a good way to build MSI (vdproj) projects using MsBuild or Nant?
I know one answer was to install Visual Studio on the build server and just use devenv.exe to build the project, but, I prefer not to install Visual Studio on our build servers.
Short of the method you mentioned above (devenv), there is no way to do this with the current version of MSBuild.
The method the Visual Studio team uses to run their MSI builds is with Windows Installer XML. You can learn more about using WiX to deploy setup packages here.
Please note WiX doesn't support vdproj files so it means you'll be recreating your installer projects.
Edit: Looks like I was beat to the chase when grabbing my references :)
We use Wix to automate MSI builds for IronPython and IronRuby.
EDIT: to clarify, this probably means starting over from scratch when building your installer. While Wix has a mechanism to create a configuration directly from a preexisting MSI file, I've never gotten a satisfactory result from using this tool
Related
I have a .Net Core 3.1 application that I'd like to deploy as a Self Contained (SCD) Deployment using an MSI Installer in Visual Studio 2019...
I have published the project as an SCD Deployment and I can run this on the target machine just fine
However, I've been asked by IT support to provide an MSI installer for the application as .MSI files work well with some of the admin/control applications they have.
So I created a setup project in my solution and selected 'Publish Items' as the Project Output of the setup project and rebuilt it...
The installer seems to run just fine on the target machine but when we try to run the installed application it says that .Net Core is required ...It's as if the installer has ignored the Self Contained aspect and just installed as a regular Framework Dependent Deployment
Is there a way to create an installer that installs an SCD deployment? Have I made a mistake in my thinking?
Many Thanks in advance,
Andy
The VS Setup Project template is quite old. Most likely it was not updated to be "aware" of the SCD support so it resorts to extracting the classic output binaries from your project.
There are other free tools that you can use to create an MSI from VS, which give you more options to customize and correctly configure the package.
If you have time and want to learn a new skill, try WiX Toolset. It is very powerful but you will need some time to get started.
If you wanted to get it done quickly and avoid the hassle, use the free VS Extension from Advanced Installer. Its GUI allows you to easily create your setup package and it has native support for .NET Core packaging too. If you follow the steps from the linked tutorial it should create a working package for your application.
Disclaimer: I work on the team building Advanced Installer.
We have for a while been building various web projects with AzureDevops and self hosted build agents.
Today I had to add a new build, consisting of a windows service written in .net core 3.1. This service has to be installed by our customers, so we have to provide it in a friendly installable way. As some of our developers were already used to handle MSI/*.vdproj projects, they added a vdproj into the *.sln to manage that. On a developper machine, this is not a problem even with VS2019: you just have to use the relevant VS studio extension...
But when it comes to building that in a CI/CD context, this becomes a real challenge. I quickly understood that we can't use MSBuild at all for that and found some alternative using directly Visual Studio (devenv)... Inspired by this thread (still opened), I came up with the following command line:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Professional\Common7\IDE\devenv" [...]\MySolution.sln /build "Release" /Project MyInstallationProject
This worked fine both on my developer machine and even on the build agent machine. But when I add it into a build pipeline as a command line task, it seems to hang, and after a while I get the following result for the job:
##[error]The job running on agent <MyAgent> ran longer than the maximum time of 60 minutes. For more information, see https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2077134
What can I do to make it work?
What are the best practices for generating a self installable in a CI/CD context? (Is MSI still relevant? )
As a workaround, you can try to install the extension Build VS Installer and use the task DutchWorkz - Build VS Installer(s) to build Visual Studio Installer Project in Azure Pipelines.
Here are some tickets(ticket1, ticket2) with similar issue you can refer to.
I am currently working on automating the build and deploy of an asp.net web application which is developed using vb.net in visual studio. Currently, developers are building the solution and projects using visual studio IDE. In the solution, they have deployment/setup projects (vdproj) for each environment (e.g.: app.setup.dev, app.setup.uat, app.setup.prof) which creates msi for the deployment and the web.config is embedded on it.
We are using github for scm, jenkinsfor build/CI and udeploy for deployment.
I am able to build the solution using msbuild cli thru jenkins. However, vdproj cannot be built using msbuild. Alternatively, I installed Visual Studio and MS VS Installer Projects Extensions in my build server, then build the vdproj using devenv. I am not sure if that is a correct way, maybe it is just a workaround.
What is the appropriate way to package the deployment artifacts (contents files, dlls, web.config) and deploy them? And How? If there’s another way to do it rather than creating MSI, it would be great as I don’t have to get a license for the Visual Studio in my build server.
I am currently working on automating the build and deploy of an
asp.net web application which is developed using vb.net in visual
studio.
Maybe you can try publish asp.net web-app by msbuild command-line.
1.As far as I know, we can build and deploy by Visual Studio, see this document.
2.And without VS, you can build and deploy(publish?) by msbuild command-line, there are many resources about this topic.
See:
How to deploy an ASP.NET MVC application on build using MSBuild in Visual Studio 2015?.
How to build and deploy a web deployment package using MSBuild
Using MSBuild.exe to “Publish” a ASP.NET MVC 4 project with the cmd line
In this way, you can get similar function by specifying the parameters and don't need to have VS installed in the server.
What is the appropriate way to package the deployment artifacts
(contents files, dlls, web.config) and deploy them?
Do you have to package them into .msi or .zip and then publish it. If not, simple msbuild command like: msbuild xxx.sln /p:WebPublishMethod=xxx /p:PublishProfile=xxx is enough.
Not certainly sure if it's what you want, hope it helps.
I'm compiling ASP.NET code for the first time ever and I'm stumped.
I downloaded MINGW-Get and just finished installing it. The client gave me the source code and I found a file called RSConfig.exe.
So I assumed that was the config file, ran it, and then tried "make" but got the error
No targets specified and no makefile found. Stop
Any idea what I'm supposed to do? I don't see anything that would resemble a makefile in the source code.
Thanks in advance!
Do yourself a favour and install Visual Studio Express:
http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-editions/express
It makes development easier and fast
It sounds like you might want to get familiar with the background concepts around asp.net and it's defacto development environment Visual Studio (there are many versions of visual studio).
As Andrei recommends, using Visual Studio Express is a good free way of getting started. The version most suited for web development is Visual Web Developer Express.
Attempting to compile .net code from a toolset such as MinGW isn't a typical route for using asp.net, however I've not used MinGW before and not sure it's possible to compile .net code from it.... Although it is perfectly possible to compile .net code from the command line (using the .net framework sdk) , I certainly wouldn't recommend it if you are getting started.
I'm going to make a guess that it is an ASP.net web forms project, it being the most prolific asp.net project type at the moment.
This official asp.net site http://www.asp.net/web-forms will guide you through what web forms are and how to get the development environment setup. Having this sort of background will aid you in solving your particular situation.
I want to set my server to automatically build my application upon commit on SVN repo, then deploy on a test/homologation server.
What I planning to do:
install a build tool (Nant? use MSBuild?);
create a simple script and set a hook to SVN that starts the process of building and deploy.
To do that, what I need to install on my server desides the .NET 3.5 framework? Is Nant capable of build our application based only on our solution file (.sln)?
I researched a little bit, and the Nant last release, v0.86 beta 1, does not include the solution target.
Is there other alternative to do that?
Note that currently I only use the VS2008 build system, and do not call the MSBuild directly. Is that feasible and simple to setup on server environment?
Just use CruiseControl.NET or TeamCity.
They're both fully-fledged continuous integration servers with lots of features and easy to configure.
We use Hudson to do that. Like mentioned before. It supports MsBuild (and Nant). We use msbuild with as paramters the solution file and the build configuration like debug/release (we created a deploy and watin configuration with different web.config's). No extra tasks or different scripts than the solution file we us in visual studio. (which I think is the setup you're after)
Additionally before deployment we setup a webserver (cassini) with the results of the build execute nunit (watin) tests. All through Hudson, which shows a nice diagram of the nunit test results.
TeamCity and CruiseControl.Net should be capable of doing the same thing,but I found hudson to be a snap to setup, and configure. (It has everything included in a package just start it)
What's also nice is that it supports SourceCop and FxCop results which you can view in a diagram and look at the location a certain warning applies to in the sourcefile, all using the web interface.
You could use Hudson or Cruise Control for it.
They are Continuous Integration Servers, and can also run your unit tests before deploying it.
I think you are looking at installing Cruise Control.Net. It will handle automatically checking your SCM repository, and kicking off anything build related you want.
http://confluence.public.thoughtworks.org/display/CCNET/Welcome+to+CruiseControl.NET
As for NAnt or MSBuild - it's a personal choice. I went with MSBuild as NAnt hasn't been updated in a while. That being said - they are both capable of doing whatever it is you are looking to do.
One note - if you compile in Visual Studio - you are using MSBuild. You can target the SLN or PROJ files with MSBuild through Cruise Control.net.
I use Teamcity and it was very easy to set up. Before that I used plain Nant. The Teamcity server realy changed things, because now everybody in the team understands what is going on on the buildserver.
It is free for up to 20 project configurations.
For Asp.Net you will also need Web Deployment Project on any type of buildserver you choose.
Are you realy shure you need to build sln? For a typical ASP.NET project this is not the best way. You usually build a WebDeploymentProject. Anyway Teamcity (and other buildservers I guess too) understands sln-files.