Question

A little over a year ago I posted a question about splitting a build into multiple outputs and followed the recommended solution. Now I need to build on this a little. This solution contains three projects that produce deployable bits and then some other projects that contain code common to the deployable projects (business logic and data access type stuff). Of the three deployable projects, two of them are windows services and one is a wcf webservice. I can build all of these locally fine, but when I build this on our build server things get a little strange.

When I build my webservice project locally I get a folder structure like this:

-Published Websites
   Service file
   Config file
   -Bin
       Service DLL’s

This is the desired output for the webservice, however I don’t want to build locally. When I originally built on the build server everything was getting jumbled together like this:

-Published Websites
   Service file
   Config file
   -Bin
       Service DLL’s
 All windows service exe's
 All DLL's needed by the service exe's

I followed the suggestions in the article linked at the beginning of this post. In a nutshell I made a change to the build template and also tweaked the output path in the project files. This resulted in my build output looking like this:

Build Folder
 -WIN SERVICE 1
   EXE’s
   DLL’s
 -WIN SERVICE 2
   EXE’s
   DLL’s
 -WEBSERVICE
   DLL’s

The problem here is that the folder structure for the webservice is not intact (the svc and config files and the bin folder are all missing). I need this structure as I don’t deploy directly to the webserver, we use a staging location. I’d rather not split the webservice into its own solution as it is logically related to the windows services and all the common code in the solution.

So, the big question is how do I set up a build that can output multiple directories, but one of those directories is a webservice and it contains the appropriate files and directory structure?

Answer 1

The only Solution I’ve been able to come up with is to have two different builds for this solution. One builds the webservice and the other builds the windows services. This allows me to keep the the solution together. We’ll just have to remember to run both builds when common code changes.

Any suggestions/refinements to this solution are welcome.