Azure continuous deployment for multiple projects

Question

I have created an Azure Web Site and connected it to Visual Studio Online, and this automatically set up a continuous deployment build (as per this page).

Initially this worked for a solution with one project, but now I have added a Web API project as a back end. This is named such that it is the first of the two projects alphabetically, and so now it is the only project that gets built and deployed whenever files are checked in. Which leads to my question:

How can I modify the default continuous deployment build to deploy both applications?

I'm sure it must be a fairly simple change to either the build template or parameters, or the publish profiles that are being used by the build. The only problem is I don't know: A) how to change those settings in the default TfvcContinuousDeploymentTemplate.12.xaml build template, and B) how to modify the publish profiles that are used in the continuous deployment build.

I have already, from within Visual Studio, manually published the two projects and got them to deploy to the right locations by following the instructions in this answer. I right-clicked on each project, clicked publish, then selected the "Microsoft Azure Web Apps" publish target which (after filling in all the settings) added the publish profiles to my projects and allowed me to manually deploy them how I wanted.

Unfortunately there seems to be no way to re-upload those publish profiles so that they can be used in the CD build. I've checked them into source control, I just need to know how I can get the CD build to make use of them. How can I do this?

Answer 1

After reading through the first link in my question again, I noticed that you can edit the build definition (or template) to point to the publish profile that you want to use:

Path to Deployment Settings: The path to your .pubxml file for a web app, relative to the root folder of the repo. Ignored for cloud services.

Unfortunately, this both doesn't work and only allows you to specify one publish profile file. Presumably, even if specifying this argument worked, the build would still only deploy the first app in alphabetical order.

This lead me to this question and answer though, which suggests that the Azure/TFVC continuous deployment works simply by using the ordinary Web Deploy arguments to MSBuild. Looking at the diagnostic logs of my build in Visual Studio Online proved this to be the case; here are the relevant arguments:

C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\14.0\bin\amd64\msbuild.exe /p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:CreatePackageOnPublish=true /p:DeployIisAppPath=mysitename

So, as per that question, to use a specific publish profile you can just set the additional necessary MSBuild arguments in the build definition:

Each project needs to have a publish profile called "publishprofilename.pubxml", in this case, checked into source control. I found that the user name (which is your site name with a dollar sign in front of it) is not needed, but unfortunately the password string is required. If you don't include it you get an error like this in the build:

Web deployment task failed. (Connected to the remote computer ("[mysitename].scm.azurewebsites.net") using the Web Management Service, but could not authorize.

No other arguments were required for me, but it doesn't seem ideal that the password has to be included. The default deployment setup, without using publish profiles, must be authorising with that password somehow, but I don't know how.

---

So after making this change I navigated to [mysitename].azurewebsites.net, and it appeared that still only the Web API project was being deployed. However, by going to console for the site and entering dir D:\home\site\wwwroot I can see that both projects are actually being deployed. It's just that both projects are being deployed to the root of the site, at D:\home\site\wwwroot. The DeployIisAppPath settings are different in each publish profile, but these values are being ignored. This is because the /p:DeployIisAppPath=mysitename argument to MSBuild (mentioned above) overrides any PropertyGroup settings in publish profile *.pubxml files, as described in this blog post.

What I have found is that the continuous deployment process for Azure/TFVC works by having an InitializeContinuousDeployment build activity in the TfvcContinuousDeploymentTemplate.12.xaml build template, immediately before the RunMSBuild activity. This takes the MSbuild arguments you specify in the build definition, and appends to them the ones needed to deploy to Azure. Unfortunately, this is mostly hard-coded, and that means it always specifies a single deployment path for all web projects in the solution. You can't deploy each web app to a different location using publish profiles alone.

So one workaround option is to add something like a BeforeBuild MSBuild target to each project, to override the command line value of DeployIisAppPath. The problem with this is that the path specified in the publish profile, and seen in the publish wizard, will no longer be the path actually being used for deployment.

So the solution I went with is marginally better; it is what we would describe in New Zealand as "huckery".

Basically I added an InvokeMethod build activity between the InitializeContinuousDeployment and RunMSBuild activities. The arguments for this activity are as follows:

DisplayName:
Configure build for using publish profiles (removes DeployIisAppPath MSBuild parameter)

GenericTypeArguments:
System.String

MethodName:
SetValue

TargetObject:
AdvancedBuildSettings

Parameters:
Direction:      Type:       Value
In              String      "MSBuildArguments"
In              String      String.Join(" ", AdvancedBuildSettings.GetValue(Of String)("MSBuildArguments", String.Empty).Split(New String() {" "}, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries).Where(Function(s) Not s.StartsWith("/p:DeployIisAppPath=")))

What this does is removes the DeployIisAppPath argument from the MSBuild command line arguments list completely, so that it doesn't override this same property in the publish profiles. Instead of the messing around with splitting and joining the string, it would be slightly nicer if you could just append /p:DeployIisAppPath="" to the command line, but this just sets the property to an empty string and you get an error:

"ConcatFullServiceUrlWithSiteName" task was not given a value for the required parameter "SiteAppName"

So like I said, pretty huckery, but it's a solution that allows you to have continuous deployment of multiple web projects to Azure with a minimal amount of changes to the default setup.