How do I organise continuous delivery for WCF services?

Question

I have a few WCF services that are deployed to several VMs. VMs are part of the internal only network and are not joined into the domain. From time to time I need to update the binaries to the latest version. For that I have a .bat script. Right now I trigger the update manually on each VM and I want to automate delivery via a button click from TeamCity.

I tried to run the scripts from powershell (remote jobs from TeamCity), but the security issues were a bit painful to configure, so I dropped that and returned to manual updates. Later I was thinking of adding a new method to a base contract, something like

void Update(string fromBatFile);

WCF service will call the file in a separate process (for example via cmd.exe) and will shut down its host. The bat file will perform the update and start WCF host back again.

Is this a good approach? Are there any better solutions for continuous delivery of WCF services?

Answer 1

Look into WebDeploy.

Note the part where it says "Synchronize your server farm efficiently".