New Feature in WebMatrix Beta 3: Publish Compatibility

NOTE: Thanks to Ben Byrd for writing this article … I’m cross-posting it from iis.net We are excited to announce a new feature in WebMatrix Beta 3, called Publish Compatibility. This feature inspects your local application and runs a suite of basic tests against the remote publishing server to help identify potential issues that could [...]

Skipping setting an ACL in a Visual Studio 2010 deployment package

A couple of customers have asked me how to skip setting an ACL in a VS 2010 deployment package. There are project-level properties for everything we do in VS to publish or create a deployment package. To disable setting ACLs, you can do either of these: 1) Edit the .csproj file and set  <IncludeSetAclProviderOnDestination>False</IncludeSetAclProviderOnDestination> 2) [...]

Debugging delegation rules for Web Deploy

Note: this is a cross-post from bilalaslam.com I recently had a shared hosting provider customer contact me about a problem with non-administrators deploying using Web Deploy. The specific issue he was running into was that the deployment would work if the user deployed to a sub-application (e.g. mywebsite/myapp) but not if he deployed to the [...]

Workaround for FTP Authorization Rules being deleted on sync

NOTE: This is a cross-post from bilalaslam.com. Interested in learning more about Web Deploy? Follow us on Twitter @wdeploy I had a customer contact me with an issue: FTP Authorization Rules for a site were being deleted after sync. He has two IIS 7 servers (call them source-server and destination-server), and there’s an FTP website [...]

A note on setAcl provider behavior

Note: this is a cross-post from bilalaslam.com Chances are if you are deploying an application using Web Deploy, you are using the setAcl provider. What is setAcl? It’s a provider that lets you set permissions on file system objects. Typically, this involves setting permissions on a sub-folder of your application, such as App_Data. I recently [...]

Common Web Deploy connection errors (and recipes for fixing them)

Because Web Deploy is a client-server product, unless it is set up correctly, chances are you will hit a wall pretty quickly at the point where a connection is made. In this blog post, I will show you common solutions for common errors. Read on for general tips and recipes for fixing common connectivity errors.

Web Deploy: Operations on remote application pools as admin and non-admin

Sometimes, as part of a deployment, you want to stop, start or recycle the remote application pool. For example, some lightweight database engines hold the database in memory, so if you publish a new database, changes won’t show until you recycle the app pool. Another reason to recycle the application pool is if your application [...]

Web Deploy: Replace Rule vs. Parameterization

When should you use Replace Rules vs. Parameters with Web Deploy? Read on, brave reader!

Reflect, but carefully…

Recently, I have been working on code that needs to load to a .NET assembly at runtime (for those who are curious: this is the Microsoft.Web.Administration assembly, which provides programmatic access to a lot of IIS 7 functionality). As a proof of concept, I wanted to do something simple with this assembly using reflection: print [...]

Web Deploy Tip: Deploying a site to a different directory on the destination

Recently, a customer contacted me, asking me how they can deploy a site to a different directory on source. For example, a site is under c:inetpubmysite  on the source computer, and they want to deploy to c:newdir on the destination. Here’s how you do it: msdeploy.exe -verb:sync -source:apphostconfig="Default Web Site" -dest:package=c:tempmypackage.zip -setparam:type=DestinationVirtualDirectory,scope="Default Web Site",value="c:newdir" Let’s [...]