Hello,

This might be a stupid question. Does anyone know of, or have they ever used any code to deploy and asp application. Sort of like a setup exe that takes care of the whole installation process for the customer??

Any help or guidance would be cool...

Thanks,

Adam

Typically, an ASP.NET application deployment only needs to consist of copying the pages and assemblies to the destination server (also known as XCOPY deployment). Obviously, there's a little more you need to do, like setting up a website or virtual directory on the IIS server, but I never written anything that does that automatically.

Peter
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Work smarter, not harder.

As Peter says typically a lot of it is just copying files. However if you also need an easy way to programatically create the virtual directories, take a look at the sample IIS admin scripts in c:\Inetpub\AdminScripts - there's one called mkwebdir.vbs. There also was a script called adsutil.vbs which basically allowed you to do everything: create the directories, specify whether it run in or out of process, change the anonymous user etc - but I can't seem to find this on my system (IIS 5.1) so maybe its an older script.

As to the installation itself I've used Inno Setup (http://www.jrsoftware.org/) which is very good, easy to write the scripts (if you want a GUI for this check out http://www.istool.org which creates Inno Setup scripts) and free! It allows you to copy files, register components, run scripts, change the registry - just about everything really.

hth
Phil

Found adsutil.vbs in C:\Inetpub\AdminScripts on my NT 5.1 and it's a VBScript file containing 2545 lines of code!

 - mega

I've found it on another server at work in that same location - so i have a copy now too:D. I know its a relatively big file, but I wasn't suggesting that Adam use it as a basis for creating his own scripts. I was thinking more along the lines of:
- include adsutil.vbs in the files deployed for the release
- add some script lines to the install to run adsutil.vbs supplying the necessary params to create the virtual directory
- delete adsutil.vbs at the end of the install

Here's an example of the script lines I was thinking of:
cscript adsutil.vbs delete W3SVC/1/Root/NewSite
cscript adsutil.vbs CREATE_VDIR W3SVC/1/Root/NewSite
cscript adsutil.vbs APPCREATEPOOLPROC W3SVC/1/Root/NewSite
cscript adsutil.vbs SET W3SVC/1/Root/%1/AppFriendlyName NewSiteName
cscript adsutil.vbs SET W3SVC/1/Root/%1/AccessFlags 513
cscript adsutil.vbs SET W3SVC/1/Root/%1/Path "physical path to files"

hth
Phil

Thanks all of you for your help, at least I have some things to look into now. Will let you know how things go.

Adam