Code Smart Not Hard - Team Deploy 2010 is released

Team Deploy 2010 is released

Today I have released Team Deploy 2010 for Team Foundation Server 2010. In this post, I am going to give a quick overview of Team Deploy if you haven’t used it before, explain this release and upcoming releases, compare it to Lab Management 2010, and give a walkthrough for setting it up and uninstalling it.

What is Team Deploy?

Team Deploy is a set of custom build activities used to deploy MSIs to multiple client PCs and/or deploy services to servers. This activities include the ability to kill processes, start/stop services, pass in arguments to the MSIs, provide the service username/password, and uninstall previous versions. Team Deploy uses SysInternal’s PSTools to remotely execute MSIEXEC to install the MSIs and PSKill to kill processes. By using Team Deploy, development teams can create automated build and deploy processes for better configuration management. Deployments can be done on demand or scheduled just like any other build in Team Build. If you are using Team Foundation Server 2008, Team Deploy 2.1 is the current release to download. Team Deploy is open source and free to use. It can be downloaded from http://teamdeploy.codeplex.com

This Release and Future Plans

I am calling this version of Team Deploy 2010, Release 1. This release is a 1 for 1 port of the MSBuild tasks to Workflow custom activities. I wanted to release this version without any additional enhancements so development teams can upgrade their build definitions to workflow. I have a lot ideas for future versions. Lab Management 2010 has given me some ideas (see comparison below) and there are several other things I want to do. Here is a list of some:

MSI Package for Team Deploy 2010 – For custom build tasks, deployments are easy. Basically just copy the Dll to the MSBuilds folder and use that path in the build definitions. For Team Build custom activities, it is a little more complicated. As you will see in the Setup Walkthrough below, there are several steps that are fairly easy to do manually but are going to be more difficult to do with a custom task. I have begun working on this but it wasn’t ready for this release.
Breakout Deploy activity into Workflow – Currently the Deploy activity does all the work and calls the other activities within code. I want to create an additional workflow with all of these steps in a workflow.
PowerShell capabilities – PowerShell 2.0 has the ability to be run on remote machines. I want to research this functionality and see if it makes sense to create an addition set of activities that use PowerShell instead of PSTools.
Custom Build Definition Screen – Display screen to create the deployment options through the UI instead of creating it in XML today.
Change the Threadpool to .Net 4 Tasks for deploying to multiple machines at the same time.
Team Deploy build definition to call another definition to do the build and deploy (Similar to Lab Management)

Team Deploy and Lab Management

Visual Studio 2010 introduces an additional product for Team Foundation Server 2010 called Lab Management 2010. This product allows virtual environments be created, quickly provisioned, used for manual and automated testing. Lab Management also includes a new build definition type and activities. With the build definition type, it allows you to revert the virtual environment to a baseline snapshot, build the application, deploy the application, run the automated tests, and capture the results. So Lab Management can do what Team Deploy can do and a lot more. The one area that I have seen Team Deploy used where Lab Management would not be used is for deploying applications to QA and Production. I have worked with several companies that use Team Deploy to deploy to all of their environments for a consistent deployment process.

Team Deploy Setup

Here are the steps to install Team Deploy and create a simple build.

1. The TeamDeploy2010_R1.zip file contains the following 4 files that are used to install the application.

2. Copy TeamDeploy.Activities.* to a location in source control and check in.

3. Add TeamDeploy.Activities.dll to the GAC using Gacutil.

4. Add source control location of custom assemblies to build controller. ($/TestBuilds/CustomActivities in this example)

5. Copy DeployTemplate.xaml to source control in the BuildProcessTemplates folder.

6. Create a new build definition. In the Process Step click on “New” Template and add the existing DeployTemplate.xaml template that was added to source control. Click OK.

7. Set the build properties to where the PSTools is installed and where the deployment XML is located. Click Save.

8. Rename and edit SampleDeployScript.xml to specify applications to install and machines to deploy to. See http://teamdeploy.codeplex.com website for full list of options available. If you open the DeployTemplate.xaml. It should look like this.

If there is an error for the deploy activity. Delete the AgentScope activity.

1. Add Team Deploy 2010 Activities by right clicking in the toolbox and select “Choose Items…”. Make sure System.Activities Components tab is selected and select “Browse…” to find the location of the TeamDeploy.Activities.dll and choose it.

2. Once you have added the TeamDeploy.Activities.dll, you will see the activities selected. Click Ok.

3. Clicking Ok will add the activities to the toolbox. Drag the Deploy activity to the AgentScope container. The required properties will cause a red error icon to display. Fill out the properties to where you have the deployment script and PSTools installed. (Sometimes the designer won’t let you drag the Deploy activity to the canvas. Save the workflow, exit Visual Studio 2010, and reopen the workflow. It should then.