CI and msdeploy: I want deployment package to be build by my CI tool

Here’s a scenario I have in my current project: ASP.NET MVC application is being deployed to a number of environments (staging, test, uat, production). Web Deployment tool (aka msdeploy) is used for assembling deployment package and for the deployment itself. There’s a CI tool employed (which is TeamCity) with corresponding set of [ms]build scripts.

At first sight the problem seems to be fairly simple – if Visual Studio can build deployment package for us, so why can’t we? It ain’t so simple, because in order to invoke msdeploy [for building deployment package] you need to provide it a lot of arguments and (which is more important) have all the files to be packaged ready at some location (which is not your project directory). This is done by Visual Studio when you … create a deployment package (via project context menu –> Build Deployment Package). But the problem is that this is an explicit action, triggered via a dedicated UI element (i.e. it’s not part of the build process). Fortunately for us, deeps inside it actually relies on a set of MSBuild targets that do all the job (for the curious ones: they are defined in Microsoft.Web.Publishing.targets file which resides in Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\Web\ folder on your system drive). And there’s a ‘magic switch’ which can be passed to MSBuild so it actually build deployment package as part of a normal build process.  These parameters are:

DeployOnBuild=True
DeployTarget=Package

so you will have to invoke msbuild like this

msbuild MySolution.sln /p:Configuration=Release,DeployOnBuild=True,DeployTarget=Package

In case you want to always create a deployment package during build, you can define the same parameters in your project file (but this will require editing it outside Visual Studio).

HTH,
AlexS