Announcing Web Deploy 3.0 RTW

It’s my pleasure to announce the final release of “Microsoft Web Deploy 3.0”. Web Deploy simplifies the deployment of Web applications and Web sites to IIS servers. It also, facilitates migration of IIS servers from older version to newer versions.

If you are new to Web Deploy, Please read our Introduction to Web Deploy tutorial.  Web Deploy 3.0 can be installled using these links x86/x64. More details on installation can be found in Installing & Configuring Web Deploy tutorial. Previous Web Deploy 3.0 versions will be upgrade to the RTW version, and this V3 will continue to live side-by-side with Web Deploy 2.0 & Web Deploy 1.1.

Here's a rundown of new features in Web Deploy 3.0:

Deployment & Migration to IIS8

If you are impressed with cool new features of IIS8 and Windows Server 2012 and looking for migration strategy from your existing IIS Servers, Web Deploy 3.0 fully supports migrating to IIS8 from IIS 6, IIS7 and IIS7.5. Please follow our documentation walkthrough on migration Synchronize IIS Migrate a Web Site from IIS6.0 to IIS7 and above Web Deployment experience for IIS8 is no different than publishing to IIS7, you can learn more about publishing in our tutorial "Testing Web Deploy Publishing from Visual Studio 2010 and WebMatrix."  Web Deploy ships with Visual Studio and Web Matrix and is the default web publishing tool for these.

Publishing to Microsoft Azure Websites


Web Deploy 3.0 supports deploying websites to Microsoft’s new Azure Websites offering. You can either directly publish from Visual Studio/WebMatrix or use Web Deploy cmdline for same.

Incremental Database Publishing using Data Tier Application (DAC) framework

We have added support for incremental data sync and SQL Azure download using SQL DACPAC framework. More details can be found here.

Automatic Backup

One of the common feedback we received that customers often make mistakes while publishing changes to websites. This is especially true for amateur developers and small business owners. It is very hard to recover from these mistakes. In Web Deploy V3 we are introducing new feature "Automatic Backup" which will allow server administrators to configure servers in such a way that each publish will automatically generate a backup and store it on server. If you need to roll back or go to a previous version, you will be able to do it without involving server administrator. You can also manually trigger the backup using msdeploy cmdline.You can learn more about this feature in our "Automatic Backups" Tutorial.  

PowerShell Cmdlets

Web Deploy command line is very versatile which also makes it equally complex. Based on your feedback, team has invested into PowerShell Cmdlets for common Web Deploy tasks. We are releasing more than 20 PowerShell Cmdlets in this release. Powershell cmdlets includes help description as part of cmdlets themselves. More details are provided in "PowerShell Cmdlets" tutorial.  

Improved Parameterization

Web Deploy supports parameterization of publish settings during deployment time. To learn more read Web Deploy parameterization.

  1.  Extend the current xml parameterization beyond attribute value replacements to a more complete xml modification story by allowing addition/deletion/replacement of new elements.
  2.  Accept the replacement data for parameters to come from the server, from the package itself or from the source.
More details can be found here  

Others

Apart from above we have added many small improvements in our latest version. Please follow these links for more information.        

Summary

We are excited about Web Deploy 3.0 and thrilled to be able to get the RTW in your hands. The engineering team is eagerly looking forward to hearing your feedback which will help us continue improving Web Deploy.

 

6 Comments

  • The Web Deploy 3.0 ReadMe reports the following known issue:

    "Web Deploy Agent service does not work with local users accounts that are not the Administrator user account, but are members of the Administrators group. ERROR_USER_NOT_ADMIN error is returned. The Remote Agent Service accepts either built-in Administrator or Domain Administrator credentials, any other administrator credentials will not work and will cause this error."

    The company I work for is concerned that this could introduce serious security vulnerabilities and will therefore not permit the use of built-in Administrator or Domain Administrator accounts for automated deployments. They are going to stick with Web Deploy 2.0 until the problem is resolved. Is there a fix in the pipeline?

  • Classfactory-

    This limitation is only for workgroup enviornments. You can use any domain account with sufficient privilages in other cases. Even for Workgroup cases, there is a workaround noted in readMe file, which I have copied below.

    Workaround:

    Use built in administrator account or domain user account (part of admin group on the local machine).The Remote Agent Service accepts either built-in Administrator or Domain Administrator credentials. If you have a non-domain setup and want to use account other that built-in administrator, please do following:
    •Create a separate user group MSDepSvcUsers on remote computer.
    •Crate an local account A on both local & remote computer.
    •Add A to MSDepSvcUsers on remote computer.
    •Use account A to publish, this will allow you to publish without needing to use built-in admin account.

  • That's great news - it wasn't clear to me from the ReadMe that the limitation only affected workgroups.

    Thanks for clarifying.

  • Thanks for a great feature. Also, I would like to know the transformation possibilities for CorpSTS enabled environments... Looks like it isn't supported today with Web Config Transformations... Could you please suggest?

  • Precisely how to transform content in Microsoft.IdentityModel Tags for various environment configurations

  • A study has been helpful..
    http://www.oyunoynatr.org/

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