Rules to Better Continuous Deployment

TFS and Windows Azure work wonderfully together. It only takes a minute to configure continuous deployment from Visual Studio Online (visualstudio.com) to a Windows Azure website or Cloud Service.

This is by far the most simple method to achieve continuous deployment of your websites to Azure. But, if your application is more complicated, or you need to run UI tests as part of your deployment, you should be using Octopus Deploy instead according to the Do you use the best deployment tool rule.

Often, deployment is either done manually or as part of the build process. But deployment is a completely different step in your lifecycle. It's important that deployment is automated, but done separately from the build process.

Octopus Deploy 2.6 introduced a new Lifecycles feature that makes Continuous Integration from TFS much easier. It's a must have for projects in TFS that use Octopus for deployment.

As well as allowing continuous integration, the Lifecycles feature adds some good governance around when a project can be deployed to each environment.

Publishing from Visual Studio is a convenient way to deploy a web application, but it relies on a single developer’s machine which can lead to problems. Deploying to production should be easily repeatable, and able to be performed from different machines.

Configure the ExecuteBatchTemplate Build Process Template.

Your source control repository should be the source of all truth. Everything, always, no-matter what should go into source control.

This includes any deployment scripts and Web Deploy parameter files if you need them.

(Before you configure continuous deployment) You need to ensure that the code that you have on the server compiles. A successful CI build without deployment lets you know the solution will compile.

You should create a Deployment Batch file and SetParameters file for each Environment.

TODO: MattW - View GitHub issue

If you use Azure websites and VisualStudio.com you can set up continuously deployment in 5 minutes.

In theory WebDeploy can create a site for you when you deploy. The issue with this is that many settings are assumed.