I am planning to move from TeamCity to Visual Studio Team Services CI builds (mainly to avoid having to run and manager a server for TeamCity, version control repository etc.)
My TeamCity build uses a third party obfuscator, called Crypto Obfuscator for obfuscating code when it is built. I have searched through all available documentation online but cannot find out if Team Services lets you somehow install and use third party tools in CI builds.
If not, is there any way obfuscation can be introduced in Team Services CI builds?
Thanks for your time.
The new build system is task-based -- you can either write a custom task and upload it to Team Services, or just call the appropriate command-line utilities on your build server.
If you're using a hosted build server, you'll have no ability to install third-party tools.
The Team Services build service (build server hosted by Microsoft) is not for you. You won't be able to run the obfuscation program you have.
But you can use your own Build server, connect it to Team Services and keep your MSBuild script.
Related
We have Artifactory and Xray for our developers and we have Azure DevOps pipelines integrated with these tools where the builds are scanned for each pipeline execution.
But when developers are doing local builds from their development workstations they also need to be scanned before merging to the repos in ADO.
So we are looking for some possibility where the developers are able to connect to Xray from their IDE client itself.
They are using IDEs like, Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code
need to Run the local builds of - NuGet, Maven, Gradle, Android, IOS, Nodes..
Can anyone suggest how this can be achieved from IDEs or CLIs like (jFrog CLI, or git bash, etc...)
You can use the JFrog VS Code Extension which allows you to scan project dependencies using JFrog Xray in VS Code.
It allows developers to view panels displaying vulnerability information about the components and their dependencies directly in their VS Code IDE. The extension also allows developers to track the status of the code while it is being built, tested and scanned on the CI server.
I have the following doubts in BizTalk deployment:
How to deploy the BizTalk application to the production server?
When I am modify the existing BizTalk application like artifacts, custom pipeline/functions, custom classes, etc., how again do I deploy the BizTalk application to the server?
I know BTDF is the one of the best tools for deploying BizTalk applications and we can deploy BizTalk application to server using it?
1. Deployment
For deployment you can use the built-in MSI generation wizard.
It means you deploy the application on a dev environment using Visual Studio, then on the admin console, export the application a MSI using the wizard.
Finally you can use that MSI to deploy the app to the Production server.
That's a two step process (Run MSI, import MSI in Bizalk Admin console).
Note that only your Biztalk assemblies are installed by the MSI.
If you use .NET assemblies in your solution, they need to be GAC'ed manually.
You will also need to restart the host instances running your Biztalk application.
See details here:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-ca/library/aa559168.aspx
That's a few manual steps.
Alternatively you can automate some of these steps by using the BTSTask, a command line tool included with Biztalk.
You can script all the manual steps.
Obviously it takes time to write such script, so it's only worth it if you are going to deploy many times in non-dev environments.
BTSTask reference:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-ca/library/aa559686.aspx
2. Redeployment
Usually you completely remove the old version and then install the new one:
Delete the application from the Biztalk Administration Console and ungac the assemblies it uses.
The whole process would look like:
1. Make sure there are no running instances in you application. You can always disable your receive location and let the running instances complete
2. Delete Biztalk application
3. UnGAC associated assemblies
4. Deploy new Biztalk application version and GAC associated assemblies
5. Restart Host Instances used by your Biztalk application
EDIT: To address OP's concern about deleting a running application:
It is indeed possible to deploy resources independently and never delete your application.
But it does not mean you will not interrupt the service.
An orchestration for example, can never be redeployed when it has running instances.
So assuming that you divided your functionality properly into applications, I find it cleaner and easier to delete the whole application than going after each resource.
Otherwise, yes you can go and replace your resources separately.
But to me it seems like an overhead caused by not having defined applications correctly.
3. BTDF
The Biztalk Deployment Framework is a good tool to have some kind of automation in your deployment without having to write the scripts yourself.
Good compromise between customization to your needs and setup time.
I have used it on a freelance project. It was very helpful because I was able to deliver a package with a only a couple of deployment instructions, and the non-techie client was able to deploy painlessly.
we uses on-premise tfs 2008 for source safe and build engine. The build script is heavily customized with msbuild scripts. Developers uses active directory to authenticate then queue a build.
We look around to go to Visual Studio Online, question
- the big concern is the build script, we don't really want to rewrite it, is it possible to use the current MSBuild project in the VSO build process?
- for authentication, how to integrate with the on-premise AD with the VSO? how to migrate the existing security project settings to the VSO?
Ok, so the answers to all of your questions is maybe 😊.
You can continue to use your on-premises build server with VSO. If you upgrade your agents to TF Build 2010 or 2013 servers you can plug them into VSO and build in the same way.
You may be able to use the cloud build agents if you don't need custom things installed on the build agents to compile. Probably best to stick with local agents for now.
For AD you can configure an Azure Active Directory (AAD) and wire it up to VSO. There is then a connector to sync your local AD with AAD (very easy) and enable single signe-on. There are fiddly bits but mostly strait forward.
http://nakedalm.com/use-corporate-identities-existing-vso-accounts/
I enabled it for my account but without the local AD sync as I don't have one.
I have a few customer that are on VSO and sync their local AD with AAD and are very happy.
My team uses Visual Studio Online ("VSO") to manage our ALM.
We already have a push-button build-process in place to build code from our local Git repo (remotely) and deploy it to a Microsoft Azure Website on Azure.
In addition to this we want a local, development-testing environment built and deployed with a push of a button.
What is the best way to integrate an automated, on-premises development-testing deployment into our development pipeline from within VSO's ALM ecosystem?
[We do also own TFS 2012 -- is there a way to leverage it from VSO to drive an on-premises build deployment from our VSO git repo?]
To deploy builds on-premise, I installed an on-premise build server and used it as the default build controller in my build definition.
When installing the build server select your Visual Studio Online url to point the build server to your team project collection.
I used the instructions here
http://myalmblog.com/2014/04/configuring-on-premises-build-server-for-visual-studio-online/
(normal issues when installing a build server remember to copy over your MSbuild folder from a machine with Visual Studio already installed etc...)
I know it's been a while since the question was asked, but this guy did it with an extension to be added to your VSTS account to deploy directly to an on-premise IIS. I'm going to check this solution today but I'm pretty sure it will work.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/monub/2016/01/20/visual-studio-team-services-release-management-iis-web-deployment-vnext/
UPDATE
Better yet, MSDN released a complete doc for deploying an asp.net app on IIS
https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/release/examples/other-servers/net-to-vm
I have a VS 2008 solutions that includes a number of projects including a couple of class libraries, a web application, a windows service and a SQL 2008 database project. The build server currently has CruiseControl.NET version 1.5.0.6237, command-line subversion client and .NET framework 3.5 SP1 installed (Windows Server 2008 R2, no Visual Studio). I was able to configure ccnet to retrieve get latest from svn repository, build the solution using an MSBuild task and deploy the web application using robocopy. Now I'm struggling to make ccnet deploy the database script and I also need get the windows service deploy and start on the build/dev server. The latest error is that the assembly Microsoft.Data.Schema.Tasks is missing on the build server (I had to add Microsoft.Data.Schema.Common.targets and Microsoft.Data.Schema.SqlTasks.targets files to the solution and modify the database project file to get this far).
What would be the best CI/deployment approach in my scenario? Am I using the right tools for the job, or should I be using something other than ccnet? Do I need to install anything else on the build/dev server to make my life easier?
Please be very specific since I'm new to CruiseControl.NET and MSBuild tasks.
You can use nant.
For a jump start you can use
nantbuilder.
For service install
read this
For a DB deploy read this