How to deploy a number of disparate project types?

Posted by niteice on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by niteice
Published on 2010-03-21T06:42:32Z Indexed on 2010/03/21 6:51 UTC
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This question is similar to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1900269/whats-the-best-way-to-deploy-an-executable-process-on-a-web-server.

The situation is this: I'm developing a product that needs to be deployed to a web server. It consists of 4 website projects, a background service, a couple of command-line tools, and two assemblies shared by all of these components.

Now, I also happen to administer the server that this product will be deployed on. So I'm familiar with everything that may need to be done to perform an update:

  • Copy website files
  • Replace the service binary
  • Install updated components in the GAC
  • Configure IIS
  • Update database schema

After some research it seems that, to reduce deployment time and to be able to let the other sysadmins handle deployment, I want to deploy all of these as an MSI, except that I don't know a thing about installers. I know VS can generate web deployment projects, but where do I go from there? Being able to simply click Next a few times on an installer is my goal for deploying updates. It would also be nice to modularize it, so for example, I could distribute the four websites among multiple servers and have everything appear as individual components in the installer, and as one entity in Add/Remove Programs. Is all of this too much to ask in a single package?

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