When we first started surveying developers about the challenges they encounter when deploying applications the most common responses were “it’s too manual” and “it’s too difficult to make deployments repeatable”.
With so much to do during a deployment no wonder the people we polled were dissatisfied. That’s why Deployment Manager uses packages – all the assets you need in one place so you can easily and reliably repeat deployments.
We’re currently using the NuGet format for our packages, and although it works really well for Deployment Manager, our user tests have shown that creating the package feed and NuGet packages for the first time is a major stumbling block. We want this to be ingeniously simple, so we’re currently working on this area of setup.
So far we are thinking of shipping Deployment Manager with a default package feed, along with links to step-by-step tutorials on our website showing how to create NuGet packages from Visual Studio. We are also considering an ‘overview’ page illustrating how and where the Package feed and NuGet packages fit into Deployment Manager, as well as highlighting areas of the set-up that have yet to be completed.
What would your ideal way to create a package be – directly in Visual Studio or straight from your CI system?
We’d love to know so please leave us a comment!
a package build script need to be tested as well. Idealy, they can do both way. If we just have one answer, as a developer, I choose Visual Studio. As long as we tested, we commit build script/configuration to source control. CI can build it always based on the latest configuration
Thank you, that’s really useful feedback. Do you ever need to package up Databases? If so how would you like to do it?