Deploying ASP.net MVC Applications to Staging and Production with SQL

Question

We have been a ColdFusion shop for 10 years, and are now switching over to ASP.net MVC. Our target framework is .net 4.0 BETA 2 using VS 2010 BETA 2. We set up two instances of Windows Server 2008 (staging and production), and will be using our existing database server (SQL Server 2008).

None of us really have much experience in ASP.net itself, though we are all very comfortable in C# and the MVC pattern. The coding itself isn't much of an issue; but the deployment process is. Our goal is to be able to have a CI setup that will automatically pull down, and test, our applications into staging on commit - then have the option to tag, then switch, the checkouts on our production sites when websites pass QA.

Some of the things I'm having issues with here is the concept of an ASP.net application and how it integrates into SVN. CF, like PHP or RoR, are all scripting languages and as such require no build process (checking out the source into production is very straightforward). But in this case, applications need to be compiled - which is where we start to have problems. Will we need to create another server (or use an existing one) that has some sort of application that pulls down code, compiles it, then somehow pushes it on the live servers? If so, what is considered the best way to accomplish this? I imagine if we end up using a build tool such as Nant, adding additional steps to migrate the database would be trivial, but what is the best way to accomplish this as well?

Another, slightly unrelated, problem is how our designers will work with our code. Most of them are on Macs, and using VS isn't much of an option. How will they be able to edit the aspx, css and image files easily? Our goal is to make this as transparent as possible to them.

We have done a lot of shopping around, and ASP.net MVC seems to be the best option as far as our familiarity with the language, and our current platform. We just need to figure out a good build process so everything is as transparent as possible. I understand there are a ton of resources available on this, but I wanted to get the opinions of the people here from first-hand experience.

Answer 1

Microsoft TFS has a wonderful build solution built-in. It's costly, but effective. In addition, you cannot lose by looking at CruiseControl, which is free. TeamCity from JetBrains is also a great option. All of these Continuous Build and Integration solutions would provide a good starting point for your research.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/teamsystem/dd408382.aspx

http://www.cruisecontrol.com/

http://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/

Even Draco.net is a good consideration:

http://draconet.sourceforge.net/

Answer 2

We use http://www.cruisecontrol.com/ (CC) running on our SVN / Build server. You can configure CC via it's own config/script files to pull down the latest source from SVN and then spawn one or more Nant or MSBuild scripts which can perform your build and deployment.

We script all of our database changes into change scripts which also go into SVN. We then have a custom command line tool which will deploy the change scripts to SQL Server during the web site deployment. All of that is done in the Nant script.

So each project's Nant script handles the build, web site deployment and SQL change script deployment.

The tricky part is handling rollbacks if/when something goes horribly wrong. I would suggest posting another question for that specific problem.