Hello,
We have recently installed a Visual Source Safe solution on our network and we are currently experimenting with deploying from VSS to our live servers. We've hit two issues that while deploying that we think can probably be handled easier, we're just not sure what we should do.
We place all 3rd party .dlls included in a site within the App_Code\Libraries folder and then we add a reference to that file, which copies those files and their .refresh files to the bin folder. Every file in the project EXCEPT the dlls in the bin folder are in source safe and get pushed to the live server when we deploy, but the dlls in the bin folder don't so then the site errors out with the message that it can't find the required assemblies. There doesn't seem to be an option to add them to source control either. Then what we have to do is FTP the .dll files into the \bin on the live server. Seems like an unecessary last step, and we'd like it so that the .dlls just get pushed when we deploy from VSS. What could we do to correct that?
The second issue is a more minor one, but it deals with connection strings in web.config. We point the web.config for the dev site to a dev version of the related DB, so when we push changes the web.config gets pushed with the dev connection string to the live server. Is there a way to have the deployment ignore connection strings in web.config so that all other changes are recorded and deployed? Or will we just have to comment/uncomment the dev and live connection strings just before deploying?
TIA,
Mike
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tillgeffken,
Thanks for the response. I'll check and see if I can unfilter .dll files, but I actually think it makes more sense for the .dlls to get compiled on the target from the references I added to the project. Do you think there's something I can enable that will cause this to happen? Right now it looks like it's just looking for the .dll files without actually attempting to compile them.
Mike
Yes,
The reason being that when we simply added a reference to a .dll that we had on our local machine, it seemed that the .refresh file would point to the local folder on our machine where the .dll was stored. This caused problems for us when modifying the website from another machine and we would get warnings stating 'cannot refresh blah.dll' etc. By copying all third-party .dlls to the App_Code\Libraries\ and THEN adding a reference to them the relative path to the files remains constant no matter which machine we are working from.
After adding a reference, Visual Studio copies the .dlls to the bin directory and I assume looks for the files in the bin\ specifically when using code that references the libraries. When we deploy the site from VSS to the live server (or even the public staging server, for that matter) the .dll files from App_Code\Libraries\ get deployed, but the same ones in bin\ do not.
Hi Mike
Is your Visual Studio project type a "web site" or "web application"? If it were a "web site" then your site would get compiled when it is first used.
Did you consider the methods for publishing a site that are included in Visual Studio: http://msdn.microsoft.com/
More powerful still, and I think this would be a good fit for you, is the "web deployment project" described here by Scott Guthrie: http://weblogs.asp.net/sco
I think deploying directly from VSS is going to limit your options.
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by: tillgeffkenPosted on 2009-05-11 at 12:38:44ID: 24358214
Regarding your first question:
We're using Team Foundation Server so i'm not sure if this applies to Source Safe too but MS Source Control systems tend to filter .dll files because they expect them to get compiled on the target. Check if you can find a file filter setting in VSS.