Deploying a website to Production From Team Build Server

Question

I have a team foundation server with build server, when I run a build it deploys to a website on that box. However I also want to do the same on Production which is a server on an external network and not part of the same domain.

I thought about looking at TFS Deployer but that just seemed to work within a network, I'm going to test it out as soon as I get a chance but I thought the best idea was to ask here when working with something so critical.

Is it a really bad idea to have a way of easily deploying to production?

Does anyone here deploy to production using whatever method? How do you do it?

Essentially the accepted answer will go to the person who can tell me the best method for achieving a deployment but pointing me in the right direction is sure to get an up vote as long as it's not too obvious.

Answer 1

Depending on the infrastructure you have available to you you can use wix to create msi's and use SMS configuration manager to deploy them to a target collection. This is the direction that we are moving to but have not reached yet. We also integrated wix into our build process to create the MSI artifacts. The reason we wanted to go down this path was because we are using CruiseControl.net as our continuous integration server and we have a nant script that we use to perform both the build process and the deployment process. They are both separate targets in the nant file, but what we wanted was a consistent model of deployment to all environments including production.

What are are doing currently is we are manually moving zips (which are artifacts of our current build process) to production. When the zips are unpackaged in the production environment we have to remove all the web.config, app.config etc from the zips and if we have new entries in the configs they are made manually.

Answer 2

Found msdeploy http://blogs.iis.net/msdeploy/archive/2008/01/22/welcome-to-the-web-deployment-team-blog.aspx