Last night I just published my first CodePlex (or any open source project)! It is called Team Deploy. This is a collection of custom MSBUILD tasks for deploying applications from Team Foundation Server to a test PCs and servers. I developed this awhile ago for my work and several of our teams are using these extensively to do daily updates of our internally built applications. It has been very helpful for us for a number of reasons:
- Anyone on our team can kick off the Build and Deploy build type in TFS (Not just me doing the builds anymore!)
- We can use the same MSI to deploy to all are environments. Great for configuration management.
- The tasks available allow for killing processes, uninstalling MSIs, stopping/starting windows services, deleting files, and installing MSIs. See the CodePlex site for more details.
There is not a lot of magic in the background on these, the real magic is actually done with PSTools. PSTools is a collection of some really handy free utilities by sysinternals (that was bought by Microsoft). Even if you don't download and try Team Deploy, you should try out PSTools. Eventually it would be nice to replace the PSTools functionality and bake it into the tasks, but for now, it works fine.
Try it out and let me know if you have any suggestions.
http://www.codeplex.com/teamdeploy
Deploy Smart Not Hard!
Mike