How can I get TFS2010 to run MSDEPLOY for me through MSBUILD?

Question

There is an excellent PDC talk available here from Vishal Joshi which describes the new MSDEPLOY features in Visual Studio 2010 - as well as how to deploy an application wit

Answer 1

If you can deploy your applications with fileCopy, it is easy to customize the TFS workflow to do so.

I've used the CopyDirectory activity, with the help of these articles:

http://www.ewaldhofman.nl/post/2010/11/09/Part-14-Execute-a-PowerShell-script.aspx

and

http://geekswithblogs.net/jakob/archive/2010/09/01/tfs-team-build-2010-how-to-place-the-build-output.aspx

Very simple and straightforward.

• I Configured the build service with a user account that has write privileges on the desired share.

• Next, I created the CopyDirectory workflow step, configuring the source as BuildDetail.DropLocation + "_PublishedWebsites" and for the destination I created an argument, which I called "DeployPath", that can be filled in the build configuration.

• Now I still have to implement a test to check if the build was successful before invoking the CopyDirectory activity. The articles I mentioned show how to do that. They also teach how to invoke a powershell script instead of CopyDirectory.