Automated Deployment TFS 2010

Question

I am using TFS 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 premium edition. Can someone please guide me on where to start for automated deployment scripts ? Any documentation / guidelines will greatly help.

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Above links mostly explain the strategy for automated deployment. I need to find out how to write a deployment script and how a deployment script looks like.

Answer 1

Without knowing which type of application you want to deploy its hard to give a correct answer, but here are some usefull links i think.

If you want to deploy a ClickOnce application with TFS 2010, try this article at codeproject

TeamDeploy from codeplex looks good, but i have not used it yet.

The community TFS Build extensions

A litte bit about web deployement

Answer 2

We have just started using TFS Deployer ( http://tfsdeployer.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Preparing%20Deployment%20Scripts&referringTitle=Home ). Basically it's a windows service that monitors build quality changes and can trigger custom powershell or batch scripts to run when it changes.

When a checkin happens, the build agent grabs the source builds it, runs any unit tests etc then publishes the result to the build drop folder. It also sets the quality of the build to something like "unit tests pass". Tfs Deployer then fires up, grabs the build and releases to our development test environment and runs some further tests. If these pass it sends an email to let people know any manual checks can be run.

The beauty of using build qualities is that after manual tests are run, we can update the quality and have yet another deployment trigger and so on and so forth until we (manually) trigger the production release. If you put the deploy as part of the build template you can trigger multiple chained deployments on the same binaries.

Because it runs custom code you can use any method of deployment you want, as long as it's scriptable (msbuild, msdeploy, clickonce, msi generation etc etc).

Scripts can be shared between builds (in the same team project) simply by pointing all relevant builds at the same scripts in the config file.

The documentation is a bit out of date, but it was fairly easy to setup and get going.