Question

The integrated Web Deployment in Visual Studio 2010 is pretty nice. It can create a package ready to be deployed using MSDeploy on a target IIS machine. Problem is, this package will be redistributed to a client that will install it himself using the “Import Application” from IIS when MSDeploy is installed.

The default package created always include the full path from the development machine, “D:\Dev\XXX\obj\Debug\Package\PackageTmp” in the source manifest file. It doesn’t prevent installation of course since it was designed this way, but it looks ugly in the import dialog and has no meaning to the client. Worse he will wonder what are those paths and it looks quite confusing.

By customizing the .csproj file (by adding MSBuild properties used by the package creation task), I managed to add additional parameters to the package. However, I spent most of the afternoon in the 2600 lines long Web.Publishing.targets trying to understand what parameter influenced the “development path” behavior, in vain. I also tried to use the setAcl to customize security on a given folder after deployment, but I only managed to do this with MSBuild by using a relative path… it shouldn’t matter if I resolve the first problem though.

I could modify the generated archive after its creation but I would prefer if everything was automatized using MSBuild. Does anyone know how to do that?

Answer 1

The displayed path is determined by the property _MSDeployDirPath_FullPath.

This property is setted by this chain of properties:

• <_MSDeployDirPath_FullPath>@(_MSDeployDirPath->'%(FullPath)')</_MSDeployDirPath_FullPath>
• <_MSDeployDirPath Include="$(_PackageTempDir)" />
• <_PackageTempDir>$(PackageTempRootDir)\PackageTmp</_PackageTempDir>
• <PackageTempRootDir>$(IntermediateOutputPath)Package</PackageTempRootDir>

_MSDeployDirPath_FullPath <-- @(_MSDeployDirPath->'%(FullPath)') <-- _PackageTempDir <-- $(PackageTempRootDir)\PackageTmp

AS you can see, you can’t have a relative path, because _MSDeployDirPath_FullPath is the fullpath of _MSDeployDirPath.

But you can simplify the displayed path by overriding the property _PackageTempDir with the path you want to be displayed to your customer. (This path will be used as a temporary directory for the package generation)

You could override the property :

• In command line :

  msbuild.exe projectfile.csproj /t:Package /p:_PackageTempDir=C:\Package
  

• Or directly in the project file :

  <Import Project="$(MSBuildBinPath)\Microsoft.CSharp.targets" />
  <Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath32)\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\WebApplications\Microsoft.WebApplication.targets" />
  
  <!-- Must be after Microsoft.WebApplication.targets import -->
  <PropertyGroup>
    <_PackageTempDir>C:\Package</_PackageTempDir>
  </PropertyGroup>