Web Deployment Tool RC1 has shipped

The Web Deployment team is excited to announce that RC1 shipped this morning! We now have a release candidate that can be used for production testing and supports many new features.

So what did we add, you ask?

The biggest feature is our integration with the Web Platform Installer, or WebPI. Now you can use WebPI to seamlessly install community web applications DotNetNuke or WordPress on your machine including all of their dependencies such as IIS, ASP.NET, PHP, etc., using the Web Deployment Tool to perform the application install. You can even submit your own applications into the Windows Web Application Gallery so they can be included in WebPI!

Beyond that we have a bunch of features as well as a lot of performance and stabilization work.

Web application packaging and deployment additions:

• Added the ability to create packages by hand without requiring the Web Deployment Tool to be installed.
• Enhanced the iisApp provider so that IIS application packages can be installed on IIS 6.0 (Windows 2003) and IIS 5.1 (XP).
• Added the setAcl provider, which allows you to set ACLs on a destination machine. You can set ACLs on a folder or file and specify a username or group. It can also automatically detect the application pool or anonymous user to set ACLs for.
• Improved the parameterization feature, including:
  • A single parameter can be written to multiple places, instead of requiring a user to enter the information multiple times.
  • Tags for parameters that can be interpreted by code or the IIS Manager UI, so that you can remove parameters if they aren't needed, for example.
  • New parameter types, giving you more flexibility.
  • UI support so that any parameter type can be created.
• Added support for multiple database types.
• Added the ability to create packages in the IIS Manager that include more than just IIS applications and SQL databases, now any provider can be included in a package.

Web server synchronization additions:

• Added logging for the Remote Agent Service, so that you can easily troubleshoot remote sync issues.
• Improved the logging for the Web Deployment Handler so that less unnecessary data is logged.
• Added automatic detection of encrypted properties in IIS configuration, so that an encryption password must be set.
• Improved the performance of synchronizations and fixed several of the issues with syncing large amounts of content.

Documentation
Walkthroughs can be found at the Web Deployment Tool main page.
Full product documentation can be found at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd569024.aspx.

Please join us in the forums and tell us what you think. What's great, what's bad, what's missing... we want to know!

Happy deployments!