Question

We have several web services that we have been deploying “manually” using msdeploy. We pick up the deployment packages from the TFS2010 build machine in the appropriate _PublishedWebsites\<<ProjectName>>_Package directory.

We now want to wrap the deployment packages up with a deployment tool that makes it easier for the person doing the installation to see the parameters.

What we’d like to do is to build the individual web service deployment packages, have the deployment packages land in the right place for the deployment tool build and then have the deployment tool build both build the tool and copy the previously-built deployment packages to the same Binaries drop folder on the build machine.

For some reason, this seems incredibly difficult to do.

Things we’ve tried

• Setting Location where package will be created on the web services project’s Package/Publish Web project settings using a variable (e.g. $(TargetDir)). Visual Studio interprets the entered variable and replaces it with the hard-coded path for the development machine… and that’s what goes to the build machine. On the build machine the end result is… nothing; the deployment packages are still sent to _PublishedWebsites\<<ProjectName>>_Package.

• Setting /p:PackageLocation on as one of the MSBuild Arguments settings on the TFS build definition “Process” / “Advances” section, in addition to /p:CreatePackageOnPublish=true /p:DeployOnBuild=true. All this did was generate the error:

  MSB1008: Only one project can be specified. Switch: p:PackageLocation=$(BinariesRoot)\DeploymentFiles For switch syntax, type "MSBuild /help"

  presumably because there is more than one deployment package being generated by the build.

Any advice appreciated! Are we going about this the wrong way? Should we be doing something like altering the build XAML to cater for this (like this page suggests for another issue)?

Answer 1

Couple possibilities for you to consider:

1 – Alter the TFS workflow like you’ve described to perform some copy task

2 – Create an MSBuild project that runs after your standard Packaging steps to copy the output from _PublishedWebsites to some location of your choice

3 – Override the following MSBuild parameter when building the package to change the package drop location:

 <DefaultPackageOutputDir Condition="'$(DefaultPackageOutputDir)'==''">$(OutDir)[YourDesiredLocation]\$(DefaultMSDeployDestinationApplicationName)\Package</DefaultPackageOutputDir>

Note that you can see the set of packaging MSBuild parameters available to you at

 c:\program files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\Web\Microsoft.Web.Publishing.targets

I recently implemented suggestion #2 at a client, using the MSBuild overrides suggested in #3 in the custom MSBuild project file and it worked like a charm.