Classic asp - How to automate deployment - in continuous integration environment

Question

I've been doing some reading http://vishaljoshi.blogspot.com/2010/11/team-build-web-deployment-web-deploy-vs.html and https://michaelbaylon.wordpress.com/2011/04/13/managing-sql-scripts-and-continuous-integration/ ... etc on automated deployment and continuous integration etc but non of it seems to talk about automated deployment in a classic asp environment and you can't really do proper CI unless you get into automated deployment.

Can MSDeploy deploy a classic asp website? If not ... is it best to just write a build script that copies all the files over to the correct folder and then start up IIS? I've done this using msbuild and the robocopy msbuild extension task. But then how do you handle the different environments (QA, dev, staging, production) there's no web config to put the different connection strings etc ... supposedly msbuild is configuration aware ... but how does that work when there is no web config?

So with all these questions I'm struggling to really move forward with creating a deployment script / module / exe for our classic asp website. Does anyone have any answers / resources / further questions that they can point me in the direction of?

Answer 1

MSDEPLOY can deploy anything that can live in IIS. You can create a package from the existing web site, and examine it to see what got packaged. You should be able to use that to determine how to package up your site from sources.

You should even be able to create a Visual Studio project from your sources so that you can use the Web Publishing Pipeline directly. The fact that there is nothing there to compile shouldn't stop you from specifying that your .ASP files are content files.

Answer 2

Web Deploy (http://www.iis.net/download/WebDeploy) is the way to go. You just have to customize the deployment script for different environments.

You might find this links helpful:
- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms241740.aspx
- "Build" Classic ASP with TFS 2010

Answer 3

Checkout using cruisecontrol.net, we use that for our automated deploys along with msbuild and it works great. We are a .Net shop but it's basically the same thing. Cruise Control can run scripts and does handle the web.config / global.asa transformations pretty good. As long as you can script it cruise control could handle it.

Depending on your development environment you might be able to hook it into cruisecontrol. We use TFS and it integrates nicely so when we check items into our different branches (Dev, Main, Stage) it auto deploys the site to the appropriate location.

Deploying to our production environment we use MSbuild to move the code. Since it's in another network location we needed something that could go outside and do any server updates necessary.

http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net/