Classic asp - Automate Deployment - Continuous Integration

Question

I read http://vishaljoshi.blogspot.com/2010/11/team-build-web-deployment-web-deploy-vs.html and https://michaelbaylon.wordpress.com/2011/04/13/managing- sql-scripts-and-continuous-integration / ... etc. automatic deployment and continuous integration, etc., but it doesn’t seem to be about automatic deployment in a classic asp environment, and you can't really do the right CI unless you get into automatic deployment.

Can MSDeploy deploy a classic asp website? If not ... is it best to write a build script that copies all the files to the correct folder and then starts IIS? I did this with the msbuild task and the robocopy msbuild task. But while you are processing different environments (QA, dev, staging, production), there is no web configuration to put different connection strings, etc ... presumably msbuild is a configuration setting ... but how does it work when there is no website config?

So, with all these questions, I'm struggling to move forward by creating a script / module / exe deployment for our classic asp website. Does anyone have answers / resources / further questions that they can point me in the direction?

Answer 1

MSDEPLOY can deploy everything that can live in IIS. You can create a package from an existing website and examine it to find out what was packaged. You should be able to use this to determine how to pack your site from sources.

You can even create a Visual Studio project from your sources to use web publishing directly. The fact that nothing compiles exists should not stop you from indicating that your .ASP files are content files.

Answer 2

Web Deploy ( http://www.iis.net/download/WebDeploy ) is the way to go. You just need to configure the deployment script for different environments.

You can find useful links:
- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms241740.aspx
- "build" Classic ASP with TFS 2010

Answer 3

Checkout with cruisecontrol.net, we use this for our automated deployments with msbuild, and it works great. We are a .Net store, but it is basically the same. Cruise Control can run scripts and handle web.config / global.asa conversions very efficiently. As long as you can script, it can handle this cruise control.

Depending on your development environment, you can connect it to cruisecontrol. We use TFS, and it integrates very well, therefore, checking the elements in our different branches (Dev, Main, Stage), it automatically deploys the site in the appropriate place.

Deploying in our production environment, we use MSbuild to move the code. Since this is in a different network location, we need something that could go outside and make the necessary server updates.

http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net/