Every project Ive ever worked on has always had issues with deployment [ not to mention source control]. One of my friends came up with a great php system; however Ive always wanted a .NET one. I finally found one on source forge that I checked out and its pretty impressive. I am a strong believer of at the bear minimum : dev to stage to production. If you also follow at least this system, you know the woes of copying files from each location and solving issues with accidental deployments. Wouldnt it be nice if I could have one web app to control all my applications deployments? This is what I plan to use Npublisher not only in my projects but as a module in rainbow.
Npublisher, a web application deployment system by
Ting Huang , can solve most of small application deployment needs. It can even login to VSS and deploy code to multiple servers in asychronous processes as to not hold up the web application itself with file tasks. Another piece of funtionality I enjoy is the warm up feature. It seems that this feature can warm up actual web applications just by giving the url. This is pretty nice[neat] functionality and can make a deployment manager's job simple. I couldnt find a 2.0 version so I created my own. A screen shot is provided below.
With my first entry on GWB, I would just like to introduce myself. My name is Eric Ramseur and I am a .NET Consultant. I have played a couple hats but my biggest interest is Software Architecture. Currently, I am the Rainbow Portal 2.0 Admin. For those of you who do not know about our project please visit
us Rainbow Portal is a portal project based off Ibuyspy. My main responsibilities are to lead the .NET 2.0 framework version and organization.
Enough about rainbow. I also like to integrate applications and improve them. I have ported a number of 1.1 applications to the 2.0 framework [ including Rainbow] and am currently on a couple open source projects because of this reason. I think this is where I can best serve the community. Ill do my best to post 2.0 best practices as I find them out myself. I am a firm believer of teaching and the best way is to go through it yourself and then immediatly teach someone else. Only by teaching someone else do you really teach yourself.
Thanks for tuning in and my next blog will be on a .NET 2.0 Deployment system review.