Deploying a Kentico Web Site project for Development, Test, Staging, and Production

Question

Our team is currently developing a Kentico CMS 7 site using Visual Studio 2012, Team Foundation Server 2012, and a "web site" project (not a web application project) to manage our files.

We are looking for a good way to perform Continuous Integration, and Automatic Deployments.

We're able to easily build the solution's c# libraries using TFS, but we're unable to build or precompile the website in anyway way because TFS gets upset with the Kentico DLLs that are checked into the BIN folder (and need to be).

TFS 2012's tools for deployment are absolutely miserable. My experience with TFS 2012 has taught me that we should probably stay away from this tool.

There must be someone else out there that has solved this issue. We need to be able to reliably deploy this website solution to various environments, while keeping the Kentico DLLs in tact, checked into the solution, and not causing any conflicts when attempting to "build" the website.

Can you please provide me with any suggestions on how to do this? Other tools that work well? We just need this process to be reliable.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

There was a lot of talk about this at Kentico Connection in Boston this year. Seems like most people are using TeamCity or Jenkins. Brian McKeiver gave a great presentation about team development at the conference, which you can download from his site (PowerPoint warning).

Answer 2

WebDeploy is a great tool for deploying web applications, and can be automated quite easily via TFS Build. However, I believe you're going to need to change your project from a Web Site Project to a Web Application Project. In my experience most teams use Web Application Projects nowadays, as they tend to give you more flexibility in the build/deploy process.