I know this has some crossover to Serverfault.com but the advice on meta.stackoverflow was to ask it here (first) as it requires a .NET dev to answer more than likely.
I am having some problems publishing to my website a Click Once App, I am getting an error message saying (something like) IIS not running, I'm not currently at home to give an exact error message, i'll edit later if it is required to answer this question.
My ISP is lunarpages the plan I am on is this one IIS is definitely running as I have BlogEngine.NET running just fine. Anyone know what is required configuration wise (both server and client) to make this work?
The files that the ClickOnce publish create can be run on just about any web environment (include Apache/Linux.) It simply generates an html page along with the application manifest and your application files. Maybe you can deploy to a local folder and upload the files to the server?
Related
I'm planning to do an automated deployment of a website,but im kind of stuck at this moment. I have looked at MS-Deploy, it got all the functions for deploying Website. I have a created a Web application package (.ZIP file) and I tested this on my local machine it is deploying website i.e
Create Web application under default website
Publishing files in c:\inetpub\wwwroot directory
Set ACLs on directories,etc
But i want to achieve few more extra steps for example:
Check whether Web application exists in Default Website, if not
create a Web application
Check whether Application pool exists, if not create a App pool
(given name) with a specific credentials and Assign App-pool to Web
application
Before it deploys take a backup copy of existing Web application (IF
exists)
publish offline page (app_offline.htm)
publishing the files to application directory
Replace the AppSettings section(in web.config file) to with actual values
Encrypt Web.config connection string
If there is any error whilst installing web application, rollback the web application to its previous version
The question is whether can i achieve all these functions via MS-Deploy or do i need to write any script, please suggest me what scripting language should i use
Please let me know if you need more information.
Thanks in advance
I'm not an expert on this topic but have been doing a bit of research on automated deployment with MSDeploy lately, and think I can offer the following;
This is default behaviour if you use the iisApp provider.
I know you can do this with the appPoolConfig provider, but I'm unsure as to how you would run this and #1 together as part of the same package. Perhaps as part of a pre- or post-sync command?
This is standard in v3, as long as it's set up on the server. Not used it myself, but read this anyway.
Fiddly. Not supported in MSDeploy, but you can vote for it if you want. Also, check out this SO answer (and also worth checking out PackageWeb, but the same answers' author).
Not sure I follow. This is done as part of a successful deployment, surely?
Use web.config transforms and optionally the aforementioned PackageWeb for a neat way to do this. Also check out Web Publish Profiles.
Difficult. My understanding is that the encryption is based on the machine.config, so you'd either have to run a post-sync script which would run some sort of remote Powershell script on the remote server to encrypt the web.config using aspnet_regiis, or you'd have to encrypt the config as part of your build process and then muck about with custom keys and the RSA provider (some info here).
I hope that helps. As I said, I'm no expert, so happy to be corrected by those more knowledgeable. Maybe also worth mentioning that MSDeploy is a lot more powerful if you use it via the command-line rather than creating packages from VS, although there is a bit of a learning curve to go with it.
I work in a service organization where users of our internal tools are often disconnected. It is often the case that service engineers on service assignments are "stranded" with an outdated version of some internal tool.
These tools are deployed using ClickOnce publish VS2010 .NET4 . If the users run all their apps while still connected to corporate network, they would get a notification that a new version was available. As the number of various tools increase, the chance increases that some app is not updated.
Is it possible to automate this process, by a batch file or something?
So that the engineers just need to run one file when connected to corporate nw to get all the newest versions of their installed tools?
Added:
An easier way of saying it would be to have "something like Windows update" operating on corporate net, but for internal ClickOnce apps.
Very interesting question. I can't think of a quick way to do this, but it's definitely possible.
I would create another ClickOnce app whose job is to update the other ClickOnce apps. This app needs the url of each app's .application file. If all engineers are supposed to have all apps, that's easy. If not, maybe you could look through their start menu and find all the ClickOnce Application Reference files. Those files contain the url.
Next, just launch the url and pass a query string argument...
http://server/MyApp/MyApp.application?UpdateOnly=true
In the startup of your applications, you can check the query string argument and shut down the app if it's run with UpdateOnly=true.
One side note. If you set the minimum required version of each of your apps to the latest version, users won't get prompted with the new version dialog. Seems like you'd want to do that or the user would still have to pay attention and do a lot of clicking.
Where I work, we release bug fixes in to the system every night when we know our clients are not using the system.
Trying to take a step towards better service I'd like to deploy to IIS while the application is running.
A solution that comes to mind is to setup two different IIS applications and switch them over after deploy using a script. But I'm not going to try this out as I don't want any complications during our busy hours.
Does anyone have experience in this area of deployment?
Thanks
Regardless of whether you're using PHP, ASP, ASP.NET etc there is no native support for transactional deployment on IIS.
The simplest approach would be to have two physical folders and (optionally two web sites - one production, one test) on your web server, for example:
c:\websites\myapp\dep1
c:\websites\myapp\dep2
Initially your site would have its physical path pointing to c:\websites\myapp\dep1.
When you deploy your latest build you'd deploy into c:\websites\myapp\dep2. Once you're done just switch the physical path of the production site over to this folder. This means you still have the original site and can fall back to it if the new code fails for whatever reason.
The next time you do a deployment you'd deploy into c:\websites\myapp\dep1 and once you're done switch the production site to that folder.
You could optionally have a test site that points to the folder you're deploying to so you can make sure the site works before switching your production site over.
This could all be scripted.
Here's some related reading that may be of interest:
Publishing/uploading new DLL to IIS: website goes down whilst uploading
Is smooth deployment possible with componentized ASP.NET MVC apps?
Rob Conery also had an excellent blog post about the lack of a decent deployment story for ASP.NET application. You should take a trawl through the comments some of which are quite insightful:
ASP.NET Deployment Needs To Be Fixed
Getting Constructive On ASP.NET Deployment
I have a smart client app (WinForms/WPF) currently deployed using ClickOnce.
A particular client has expressed the desire to silently deploy the app to it's intranet network users as part of its nightly/weekly client PC update service - presumably via MS Systems Management Server (SMS) and Group Policy or similar (I don't understand the exact mechanisms). As such, they've requested a .MSI installer instead.
So a few questions for confirmation (along with my thoughts on answer - am more than happy to be wrong!):
Can a ClickOnce app be silently installed en-mass by admin???
My thoughts: No, because ClickOnce is a per-user installation this would be difficult unless the user is actually logged in at time of remote installation.
Is there a tool to convert a ClickOnce app/project's settings to a simple MSI installer project (e.g. Visual Studio Deployment Project)???
My thoughts: Not in the box, but would love a tool to repeatedly copy/use settings from the ClickOnce config to the deployment project - e.g. ProductName, Version, File Associations etc. This way we only maintain one set of deployment settings.
Any other alternatives for this scenario to get 'er done quick...?
I don't think you can install a ClickOnce application silently, certainly not with SMS. And I don't know of any tool that does that, but it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. ;-)
The idea of deploying a shortcut is an interesting thought. Have you ever noticed that if you leave a shortcut on the desktop even after the application is uninstalled, if the user clicks on it, it reinstalls the application?
I have a C# application (WinForms) (ClickOnce) whose repository is installed on a server that is about to crash, so my boss asked me to move the repository, but there are around 300 client machines which have the application installed.
The ClickOnce is signed with a Test Certificate.
Is it possible to move the repository without having to reinstall in the client machines?
Thanks in Advance
[EDIT]
I Have published the application to the new server, but the clients don't reach it, what else can I do? I think i should change something inside the manifest or something like that, but a actually don't know too much about ClickOnce... In any case, i would like to avoid the reinstallation on all the client machines, any ideas, suggestion? thanks in advance
The answer provided by Jhonny seemed promising to me, and I encountered an error when I tried it, which I had to solve. It had to do with certificates.
After following his setps, when I launch the ClickOnce app on the client machine, I get an error dialog: "Cannot Start Application".
When I click on the Details... button in the error dialog, the text file that opens shows that the app is trying to update from the Deployment Provider URL of the new server, but it gives this error:
"The deployment identity does not match the subscription."
The problem was the certificate used to publish the app on the old server was expired, and I had updated the certificate in the app published on the new server. The certificates didn't match.
The solution was to first publish the app to the old server with the new certificate, have the users open the app to get that update, then publish another new version with the Deployment URL of the new server, and copy the files to both servers. When the users updated the next time, they got the version of the app from the old server with the manifest pointing to the new server, and then, all subsequents updates were retrieved from the new server.
Here is what I have done, for people who may have the same issue.
Setup the new server on the publish package. (Project Properties, Publish Tab)
Publish to the new server
Copy the published files to the old server. (Include the .application file and the folder)
When the clients reach the old server, they will update, but the server location will be updated on the client to the new server name.
You could try to change the DNS alias so that it redirects to your new server.
The fact that the code signed using a certificate is not relevant, since code-signing certificates are not bound to a specific repository (as opposed to SSL certificates)
Btw, why don't you want to reinstall? The whole point of clickonce is to ease this kind of software update !!