could you use IIS integration in VBldPro ?

[briandors]

Hello Visual Build Professional users-

This is sort of an open letter to the community of users. I am a configuration/deployment engineer and love the Kinook product. It has helped me automate most of a very complicated deploy process involving COM+ applications, XML config files, windows services, etc.

One area that is still very manual (or vbscript) for me is configuration of the web sites in IIS, through Internet Services Manager. Because of custom settings we use, there are manual steps I must take (changing custom error pages, creating virtual directories, changing home directories, setting IP addresses for the site to respond on) within IIS at each deploy.

I have emailed Kinook, and as always they were VERY responsive. But I was told that this was probably the first time anyone has requested any IIS integration. That shocked me.

I find it hard to believe that there aren't other users out there that could benefit. If you could use IIS integration, please let Kinook know, either through this thread or through an email to them. Keep it short and cordial, my intention isn't to cause them any grief or "bomb" them with emails.

Kindest regards and thanks for your time.
Brian

[gribble]

Ill add my vote to this list!

At the moment i have to do a few manual steps on our IIS server to complete a deployment. If there was a way i could automate the changing of the ports on one of the multiple websites on an IIS server, i could then "trick" microsofts own .NET website msi installation package to install tothe correct one (it only can go by port number, it doesnt handle the fact you can have multiple sites on the same IIS box on the same port, with different hostheaders being the defining factor between sites and not the port!). Stupid microsoft :)

this kind of integration with IIS would also open up new doorways for us, as we could use it for deploying many of our other websites and setting the host headers etc automatically.

with IIS6 and the XML metabase backend the possibilities are even greater. I have already started writing a .NET based tool using System.DirectoryServices for looking at the IIS server part of things, then manipulating XML schema files and using cscript.exe to release the schema to another IIS server but preserving that servers filesystem etc. Then the actual webpages are updated from a zip file or from our source control system (perforce).

So if you are really keen, it isnt too hard to do this stuff yourself... you could even write a custom action for VBPro!!! :p

Why not use JScript action to do what you want.
You can pass Visual Build variables into the Jscript to make it more dynamic.
See the attached file as an example of setting up an IIS application.
Oh yes, the Macro %VIRTUAL_PATH% has
"C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\P1\P2\Application" stored in it. (Just in case you can't figure that out.