we've recently stumbled across the excellent Dispatch for ASP FTP deployment plug in. It looks great apart from one thing: It doesn't work with Visual Studio 2010, at least for us, anyway. (It's supposed to work fine.)
(Yes, we've tried everything: We've managed to get Dispatch working for another FTP site, but not the main one we regularly deploy to. We have managed to connect to our main site through FileZilla FTP, so the site itself is configured correctly. All settings have been triple checked, but the software still throws up weird errors (always to do with its internal libraries).)
So does anyone know of any other comparable FTP-based, deployment plug-in for Visual Studio?
Here's what Dispatch does (and so any suggested replacement must do):
Monitor any altered files
in the project. When a file is
changed, it's added to a list of
files to be deployed.
To deploy these
files to the live site, all we need
to do is click "Upload" and the plugin will
connect via FTP to our live site and
upload the selected files.
We can filter out
any filenames we don't want to be
monitored/uploaded (e.g. .cs or
web.config or /Images/, etc.)
I think that's all the features that we need. Thanks for any suggestions!
Note: If you're wondering why we need such a service, it's because we deploy many site changes over the course of a single day. Publishing the entire project to a folder, zipping it up, then FTPing that zip file, only to have to unzip it, and then install the entire project into the live wwwroot takes far too long. With Dispatch you're able to upload individual files in a single click.
After much back and forth between me and the creator of Dispatch, we managed to narrow down the problem to the library he was using (Rebex FTP). I posted a question about the issue on the Rebex forums, and it was revealed that their software might have a bug with IIS7.5. They suggested a quick hack/fix, which I tested and discovered worked.
Mr. Dispatch then quickly implemented this hack/fix into his software, and lo! I had a fully working copy of Dispatch... So no need for a replacement any more!
(And from what I've seen, there isn't even any other plug-ins offering this functionality, so it's just as well.)
Just an update - Dispatch does not work with VS 2013 so if you have VS 2012 with Dispatch installed, Keep it. Also the website is gone so it looks like all development has ceased. I have been using Dispatch since VS2005 and it has been great for just sending single files up when I need to. Too bad it is gone.
I built a very simple one for myself - you right click the file in Solution Explorer and it then uploads that file based on a settings file you create.
It's super crude but it works and the source is there to make it better if you like -
https://github.com/garazy/vs-2017-ftp-upload
Big enhancements have been added to VS2008, VS2010, VS2012. Below is the article. I found that Microsoft did all the above while I was searching. Since this came up high in what I was searching, thought should share this knowledge.
Deploy a Web Application Project Using One-Click Publish Without Web Deploy
Related
I am trying to use automated builds and deployments to our test IIS web server, however, as of recently, for some reason, the builds are failing with reasons for:
Cannot find Errors.resx
Errors.resx is a file within the project, and it's checked in. Even the Publish option from VS2010 works fine.
Has anyone come across this before?
I had something similar to that, I think I ended up manually patching a value in a resource file in notepad++
see msdn link
We have some legacy Classic ASP websites to maintain, and are wanting to use VS2010 to edit them, due to familiarity because of lots of .Net work.
I can open the website inside Visual Studio.
I can configure IIS to run the website based on the working folder used in VS2010.
I can configure VS2010 to automatically open my default browser pointing to the correct location, using the 'Base Url' setting in the Properties page.
What I CAN'T do, is work out where VS2010 stores this value, as there's no mention of it in the solution file that VS2010 has created, and as there's no project file for the website, there's nothing there too. Yet, when I close and re-open VS2010, it somehow retains this information.
This is important to me, as I need to be able to commit all files to our source control for use by other developers and, ideally, not have them worry about setting this value themselves.
So, the question is: Where does Visual Studio 2010 store the Base Url when working on Classic ASP websites?
I don't know where this is saved, but in tracking things like this down in the past I typically take the following approach:
Open Visual Studio and change this one setting
Apply the changes
Look for all files that have been modified in the last 1 minute in the project folders and in the Visual Studio folders
You can be sure there will be at least a few other files changed that are not relate to this, but it should narrow your search. You may want to re-close VS before searching too, but that will modify other files as well (making for a slightly larger pile of changed files to sift through).
If you still don't have it, search the registry (but I cannot imagine this would be where it was storing anything project specific).
EDIT:
Just created a new project and played with setting this property. It is definitely stored in the .suo (Solution User Options) file for the project, in the root of the project folder as #Lankymart suggested (and is a hidden file if you are not seeing it). It is not stored in plain-text.
You may be able to access it programmatically here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.visualstudio.shell.interop.ivspersistsolutionopts.loaduseroptions.aspx
As there are a ton of absolute path settings in these files, moving it to other environments is not really an option. I would suggest you are stuck with project start up documentation that lists these settings as part of the project setup process. I think any other solution is going to be equally annoying|fragile (or worse).
Not sure if there is another way to accomplish what setting the base URL does without managing from the Start Options panel - that is likely your last-best hope for a solution.
I'm using Publish/Web Deploy to deploy an asp.net aplication from Visual studio 2010. It works perfect, but there is a problem. If the new release is not working as expected, the old version is already replaced by the new one and there is no easy way to roll back to the working version. How is this best solved? I wish it was possible to keep the old version on the server so I could just switch back if needed.
With WebDeploy there is no built in rollback feature, so once you've deployed that's it.
There's a number of hand rolled strategies you could put in place, for example:
Limited Access e.g. Shared Hosting:
Where you don't have full access to the machine -
Backup the live site beforehand by downloading it.
Keep copies of what you deployed so you can push the previous version should something break
Full Access:
Maintain two sets of folders for the application and map your site to one or other of these folders. When you come to deploy switch the IIS site's physical path to the other folder then deploy. If the site fails then just knock the site back to the original folder. Each successful deploy would alternate between these two folders.
For stuff like user uploaded content you'd need to map virtual directories to a place on the file system that's always the same place because you don't want to be copying these around each time.
You're not the only one who has encountered these issues. Have a look at this article by Rob Conery and his observations about the state of affairs regarding ASP.NET deployment.
ASP.NET Deployment Needs To Be Fixed
Getting Constructive On ASP.NET Deployment
Using some form of Source Control would be another alternative. We use subversion, so if the publish goes bad, we can just update back to the last-good revision, and publish that. Even if you're the only developer, using source control can be very useful.
I am using Visual Studio 2010 and IIS 7.0 .Currently when I want to deploy an website to my web server I follow these steps -
1.Right-click on website and say publish..to get the entire site copied to a local folder.
2.Next using filezilla just ftp the copied files to the web server.
The problem is I have to deploy entire website all the time since I can't keep a track of the changes. Although I do find my way easier and without problems. I dont want to a whole lot of configuration and deployment packages unless it is really worth it and also relatively easy to do. Is there a better way I should do the deployment ? Any suggestions are welcome !
You could use the Web Deployment tool. It needs to be installed on the webserver too and can even take care of publishing a sql server database.
http://www.iis.net/download/WebDeploy
Do NOT use the Web Platform installer to install this package.
You can just right click on website and Publish Web Site; the Publish Website Wizard opens. You can click the ... button to browse on the Target Location textbox and choose FTP over in the left hand side, then put in your FTP credentials.
You can tick 'Allow this precompiled site to be updateable' so if you need to make minor changes (such as scripts, css, or html) but I don't know how reliable that is.
Good luck!
Scott Gu just published an article about the Deploy Features in VS today:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/07/29/vs-2010-web-deployment.aspx
Personally I use Dispatch for ASP.NET. Works well for me. It only uploads the files that have changed and can check for files that are missing locally or on the server.
http://dispatchasp.net/
If you are using the Publish Wizard then you have no choice but to deploy the whole site. There is no way for the wizard to look at the files on the server and know definitively if the file has changed or not (it could look at file size or something, but that's not 100% guarantee of no change and FTP doesn't offer an easy way to do a checksum algorithm).
Other then that, do it the way you would do it on any other language/tool. Just manually FTP the files you've changed. Of course, this means you have know which files are side-affected by your changes. And if you're not confident as to what files you've side affected.... publish wizard is your friend :)
I'll try to make this as straight forward as possible.
Currently our team has a VSS database where our projects are stored.
Developers grab the code and place on their localhost machine and develop locally.
Designated developer grabs latest version and pushes to development server.
The problem is, when a file is removed from the project (by deleting it in VS2008) then the next time another developer (not the one who deleted it) checks in, it prompts them to check in those deleted files because they still have a copy on their local machine.
Is there a way around this? To have VSS instruct the client machine to remove these files and not prompt them to check back in? What is the preferred approach for this?
Edit Note(s):
I agree SVN is better than VSS
I agree Web Application project is better than Web Site project
Problem: This same thing happens with files which are removed from class libraries.
You number one way around this is to stop using web site projects. Web Site Projects cause visual studio to automatically add anything it finds in the project path to the project.
Instead, move to Web Application Projects which don't have this behavior problem.
Web Site projects are good for single person developments.
UPDATE:
VB shops from the days gone past had similiar issues in that whatever they had installed affected the build process. You might take a page from their playbook and have a "clean" build machine. Prior to doing a deployment you would delete all of the project folders, then do a get latest. This way you would be sure that the only thing deployed is what you have in source control.
Incidentally, this is also how the TFS Build server works. It deletes the workspace, then creates a new one and downloads the necessary project files.
Further, you might consider using something like Cruise Control to handle builds.
Maybe the dev should take care to only check in or add things that they have been working on. Its kind of sloppy if they are adding things that they were not even using.
Your best solution would be to switch to a better version control system, like SVN.
At my job we recently acquired a project from an outsourcing company who did use VSS as their version control. We were able to import all of the change history into SVN from VSS, and get up and running pretty quickly with SVN at that point.
And with SVN, you can set up ignores for files and folders, so the files in your web projects dont get put into SVN and the ignore attributes are checked out onto each developer's machine
I believe we used VSSMigrate to do the migration to SVN http://www.poweradmin.com/sourcecode/vssmigrate.aspx
VSS is an awful versioning system and you should switch to SVN but that's got nothing to do with the crux of the problem. The project file contains references to what files are actually part of the project. If the visual studio project isn't checked in along with the changes to it, theres no way for any other developer to be fully updated hence queries to delete files when they grab the latest from VSS. From there you've got multiple choices...
Make the vbproj part of the repository. Any project level changes will be part of the commit and other developers can be notified. Problem here is it's also going to be on the dev server. Ideally you could use near the same process to deploy to dev as you would to deploy as release. This leads into the other way...
SVN gives you hooks for almost all major events, where hooks are literally just a properly named batch file / exe. For your purposes, you could use a post-commit hook to push the appropriate files, say via ftp, to the server on every commit. File problems solved, and more importantly closer towards the concept of continuous integration.
Something you may want to consider doing:
Get Latest (Recursive)
Check In ...
Its a manual process, but it may give you the desired result, plus if VS talks about deleted files, you know they should be deleted from the local machine in step 1.