What's the best way to deploy an executable process on a web server?

Question

The original question:

The title of this question might be a bit clumsily phrased, but here's the situation:

I have a .NET web project deployed on my server. It's still in beta, so there's a lot of releasing and re-releasing happening.

I have also written a C# executable in the same VS solution (call it "admin.exe") that runs in the background on the server, periodically performing certain business rule integrity checks and making appropriate insertions to a warning table in the DB.

Question is: what's the best way to deploy this app so that it gets updated whenever I make a new release? It should be running all the time in between releases, so ideally I'd like some sort of setup whereby the shutdown-deploy-startup process involves the minimum possible number of steps.

Thanks!

Edit - Bounty started

The answers given thus far have been helpful and interesting, but haven't provided me with a clear, concise and elegant solution. Please do not assume I have extensive knowledge of deployment projects, because I don't. Bounty goes to the person who can provide a solution that does the following:

1. Publish the latest version of the web site;
2. Shut down any instances of admin.exe that are running on the server;
3. Update admin.exe;
4. Launch admin.exe;
5. All of the above should be done preferably in one step, or as few steps as possible, seeing as it will be done repeatedly throughout the life of the product; and
6. All of the above should be done preferably without requiring installation of any 3rd party software.

Thank you for your help!

Minor edit - clarification

I think a lot of the solutions offered thus far have overestimated the complexity of the problem, so let me clarify: everything that is to be deployed, only has to be deployed on one computer, which also happily has Visual Studio available with all source code. I only need to (1) publish the web site to the web folder, and (2) shut down, reinstall and restart admin.exe on the same server. Isn't there a simple way of doing this in one step? Can it be done with a VS Deployment project?

Answer 1

The "correct" way is probably to set up deployment scripts and installers, but being able to just click publish in Visual Studio and skip going in with remote desktop is a lot more convenient during development.

I have an admin web app that acts as a front end to a command line app - slightly different from what you are doing, but the same solution should work.

Simply add a reference to the console project in the admin web app. Even though you don't call any methods in the console project, the reference will cause the console app to be rebuilt and uploaded when you publish the admin website.

A simple start/stop page added to the web app takes care of steps 2 & 4 - Mine calls Process.Start()/Process.Kill(), though you obviously have the option of a cleaner shutdown depending on the setup of admin.exe.

Below is the code from my start/stop page - I have them set up as web service methods (to facilitate some monitoring stuff you probably won't need), but they should work just as well called from a simple button click method. Note that the service account will need permission to run/stop the process - on a dev box the simplest option is to set up iis to run as an admin user rather than the default service account.

    private void KillProcess(string name)
    {
        var binpath = Server.MapPath("~/bin");
        var pp2 = Process.GetProcesses();

        var pp = from p in pp2 where p.ProcessName.Contains(name) && !p.ProcessName.Contains("vshost") select p;
        foreach (var p in pp)
        {
            p.Kill();
        }
    }

[WebMethod]
    public void StartQueueRunner()
    {
        var binpath = Server.MapPath("~/bin");
        System.Diagnostics.Process.Start(Path.Combine(binpath, "TwoNeeds.QueueRunner.exe"));
    }

[WebMethod]
    public void StartQueueRunner()
    {
        var binpath = Server.MapPath("~/bin");
        System.Diagnostics.Process.Start(Path.Combine(binpath, "TwoNeeds.QueueRunner.exe"));
    }

Answer 2

It sounds like you need to take a look at a custom MSBuild script for deployment.

MSBuild does much more than just build solutions. You can also use it to copy files and update them, too. A good resource for tasks to do this is the MSBuild Community Tasks here.

You can then include the deployment of your background process alongside the deployment of the Web site deployment.

An alternative approach might be to use Windows Powershell with something like PSExec to remotely execute copy and update commands.

Both these kinds of approach can be automated very well with continuous integration servers such as Hudson. I have a build process that automatically monitors my source code repository, builds the program, deploys to a staging server, runs acceptance tests, then deploys to a preview box. I have another (manual) job that with one click deploys this preview version to live, minimising downtime and (usually) reducing errors from mistiped commands.