Installing patch for Asp.net web application setup

Question

I am using visual studio web project to install my web application and do some customization like modifying connection string in web.config file during install time.

Now, My requirement is to create a patch for the web application so that next time the web installer only the changed files.

Is there is any one to do it using visualk studio 2010 ide or any other way.We can't use third party products like Installshield,wix,innosetup etc.

Please suggest.

Answer 1

Visual Studio doesn't support patches for setup projects. It supports only major upgrades.

If you really don't want to use other setup authoring tools, you can try creating the patch manually. You can read more about this here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa370578(VS.85).aspx

But it won't be easy.

Answer 2

If it is just Web project, I would recommend re-deploy instead of patching. Meaning you just deploy new version of site, above the previous one.

Except some really comprehensive case that strategy works all the time. I use simple xcopy deploy for all my projects.

Answer 3

You can write a mini C# app to do it. You can have the list of assembly files in a configuration. On loading of the app, it checks the timestamp difference between server and client files. On finding the change, the mini app pushes the changes file.

Hope, it will resolve your issue

Answer 4

There may be better suited solutins to deply websites than using an installer. For one, there's Web Deploy.

It's main purpose is deploying web applications to IIS and it allows you to modify key configuration values through a simple UI.

Web Deploy works with deployment packages; a big zip containing your application and some meta data to help install it. On deployment it will diff the deployed site with the data in the deployment package to update existing files, add new ones and remove obsolete files. You can build deployment packages directly from Visual Studio and/or from MSBuild, using your favorite build server.

Web Deploy works really well when you need to deploy often or when you have to delegate deployment to IT staff.

Customizing Web Deployment package is a bit tedious though, you may find a blog post I wrote about this useful.

For simpler situations, I recommend good version control practices and xcopy deployment. If you tag what you deploy to your server, you can zip up the changed files since last deployment and copy those to your server.