Automating the deployment of an asp.net mvc site

Question

I am currently creating my sites on my machine, deploying them to a test machine to see if they continue to work, and then ask sysadmin to deploy them to qa / production servers.
From time to time, what should be my moment of pride is killed by some deployment procedure that was misunderstood, forgotten, or not documented.
Currently, sysadmin is copying files from the dev server to any server that it sees fit, and is trying to follow my deployment of Procedures.txt.

Is there any mechanism that I can use that makes this transition as friction as possible? Things I can think of right now are

• Set the connection string to the production database
• Set CustomErrors to enable
• Verify I / O permissions for the current account
• Verify that COM objects are available.

Something that facilitates the deployment process for people who are not programmers.

Answer 1

Have you thought about using a web deployment project?

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/01/28/vs-2008-web-deployment-project-support-released.aspx

Andrew

Answer 2

If your application is just being created by you or a team over which you have some control, you need a gun for CI (Continuous Integration). There are many free products that Cruise Control.NET is what can help you.

Answer 3

You should try the following solutions:

FinalBuilder (www.finalbuilder.com) for managing layout and assembly through a shared folder.

InstallAce (www.installace.com) for the development team to build the contents of the assembly and for the support / support team to deploy the contents of the assembly package to the web farm, etc.

You can also try several less expensive tools for creating MSI packages directly or through WIX. You can get a list of all the good programs for unattended installation on wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration ), which I refer to for such information.

Cruise Control is a free solution that is also widely used by the .Net community.