Web Development and Deployment with Visual Studio 2010

Thanks for the video.  I'm looking forward to the deployment packaging feature.  Can it be configured per destination environment: Stage (QA), User Acceptance (Client), Production (Live)?  These environments are not identical.  Is the new web.config (debug vs. release) the way to address different destination environments?

Aside: As a security precaution, do not show people on video typing in their password.  If I am determined enough, I might be able to guess vijoshi's password at video time mark: 20.35.  You might want to edit that part out and vijoshi change his password.

You can go to Build-->Configuration and add all different destination configurations like Staging, UAT, Production etc... Next when you right click on your web.config file you will be able to see a command "Add Config Transforms"... This command will add web.staging.config, web.UAT.config, web.production.config to your project...  Hope this helps...
Thanks much for the security hint... I have changed my password now...
Vishal R. Joshi | http://vishaljoshi.blogspot.com

All of the stuff is great.
Now i guess MS will start working on integrating the query analyzer in VS and provide debug functionality for it.
Coz as a VS developer i have faced many difficulties in finding the bugs in stored proc's which r like 1700 lines long or so.
If that happens then there will be no stopping VS.

if u guys r not working on that then maybe u can take a que. 

Regards,
Ashish S Chettiar.

Thanks Vishal for sharing web deployment enhancements in VS 2010. I do have following questions, there may be a way already which is not shown in the video:

1. How to deploy SharePoint webpart using this feature?
2. I would like to add/replace/update the section of web.config at production server like SafeControls, namespaces, public token, version number etc. If I understood correctly from demo that package will always replace the web.config. Is my understanding correct? web.config at production server(s) may have webparts deployed by other department developers within the agency.
3. How do you handle such scenarios as desribed in #2?
4. How to use deployment feature to deploy site in the farm environment?
5. Is there a way to specify the dynamic destination server name? not a hard coded destination as shown in the demo. It would be nice at deployment, system administrator will be presented with a choice of single server name or farm.

Looking forward to hear from you soon.

Regards,

Naresh Gupta

Hi Naresh,
    Plz find the responses to your questions inline...

1. How to deploy SharePoint webpart using this feature?   --> Vishal: Currently sharepoint webparts are not part of this deployment story but there is a solution for that too, please check out the video http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/VisualStudio/Sharepoint-Development-with-Visual-Studio-2010/
2. I would like to add/replace/update the section of web.config at production server like SafeControls, namespaces, public token, version number etc. If I understood correctly from demo that package will always replace the web.config. Is my understanding correct? web.config at production server(s) may have webparts deployed by other department developers within the agency.  --> Vishal:  You bring out a good point, currently the web.config file is replaced on the server which means that changes by other departments will be lost...  MSDeploy which is the underlying technology for web deployment is provider based model, it has providers for GAC, COM, IIS Settings, Registry, Web Content and so on...  There will be an opportunity eventually where you can write a simple provider which takes the new web.config produced by VS10 and merge it on the server...
3. How do you handle such scenarios as desribed in #2?  --> Vishal: As mentioned above
4. How to use deployment feature to deploy site in the farm environment? --> Vishal: The web package which is produced by VS10 can then be applied to every server in the web farm by using MSDeploy command line directly... That step is manual today but we will be considering an automatic solution for that in the future...
5. Is there a way to specify the dynamic destination server name? not a hard coded destination as shown in the demo. It would be nice at deployment, system administrator will be presented with a choice of single server name or farm.  --> Vishal:  Yes that is feasible... That concept is called parameterization within MSDeploy; where you can mark certain items as parameters... The steps to do this would be, create a package using VS10, deploy it to your staging server with fixed destination names... Use InetMgr to take this newly deployed site, parameterize your config file with mandatory parameters like server name and when the package is installed (again using InetMgr or commandline) your system administrator can provide the values at install time.  This is explained in the PDC session http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/ES15/

If you like more details on all these functionalities you can also view the PDC session http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC33/ in which I go into much more details...

wishes
Vishal | http://vishaljoshi.blogspot.com

 

Thanks Vishal. I hope such tools may be available as add-on to Visual Studio 2008.

It's about time that Visual Studio had a decent "Publish" feature inside it.  Having the ability to save different deployment scenarios (i.e. pushing code to staging, pushing code to production, etc.) seems like such a basic feature that should have been present years ago.  Anyways, I'm glad it's going to be easier in VS2010.  Having to manually go into my web.config and change around connection strings every time I want to publish to dev or prod is such a pain.  I have been getting around it by running a script inside a tool called Nant-GUI.  I guess I'll have to wait and see whether having the web.debug.config and a web.release.config with the xml transforms will make the overall deployment process easier.  I'm skeptical, but hopeful.  =) Will there be a GUI to perform these xml transforms?

ddurose,
    I am optimistic that your wait will be worth it... There will not be a GUI to perform these xml transforms but believe me the syntax is very very simple...  I am soon hoping to write a blog post explaining it so if you like please keep reading my blogposts on the all the improvements on the space http://vishaljoshi.blogspot.com/
   Also do not hesitate to write me an email at vishal.joshi@microsoft.com in case you have any feedback/comment...
wishes
Vishal

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I spent the last hour or so watching the video and taking notes - very informative. My area of concern is ASP.NET. I have a question about Packages deployment and the software lifecycle: What is the relationship of packages to ALM/source control products like VSTS/TFS and Serena's Dimensions? Am I correct in assuming that packages could be controlled as objects in an ALM product? How would the equivalent of One Click deployment be initiated when the ALM product "pushes" a package to a target web server or distribution point such as SureSync?

I have another question. This one concerns web.config transforms. I'd appreciate your comments on protecting sensitive data in web.config files, specifically, passwords in connection strings and the relationship of such to transforms.

I have another question. Have you ever considered the philosophy that an application (web.config) should not contain any plaftorm-specific settings? Any such settings would either be fetched at runtime from a settings database or inherited from a web.config in a parent directory. Like many, my organization has wrestled for years with changing settings as a web app migrates from dev to QA to production. We even had Microsoft Consulting Services create a utility that gets added as a reference to a VS setup project that, in effect, performs transforms.

Again, I look forward to VS2010 and will try to find time to evaluate the Beta. Because this post is a little old, I'll also email my comment.

Thanks

 

Vishal,

Thank you for the video.  One question I had has to do with the control alignment tools that existed in VS2005 but no longer exist in VS 2008.  For me, not having these alignment tools for an ASP.net applicaton has significantly impacted the time that it takes to complete an application for a customer.  Can you tell me if these tools have been put back into VS 2010.  Also, concerning accessing and Oracle database.  Will you be able to access an Oracle database with LINQ just like you do with SQL?

Thanks

Kenny

 

Are these options only available for "Web Applications" and not "Web Sites"?