Derik Whittaker : PSake

Deploying Database Projects with psake

Derik Whittaker — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 10:32:16 GMT

Recently I joined a project that was using a Sql Server Database Project to manage their DB scheme and so far it is pretty cool. This project type like others has a deploy/publish option which will allow you to publish your changes to a target database. And like other project types this is very easy to do via Visual Studio, but if you know me you will know that I like to automate tasks like these rather than have to use the IDE so I did. Here is what I did in order to use pSake, a build automation tool written in powershell, to handle my clean, build and deployment of my database projects.

Step 1: Learn

Understand the automation options available for this project type and MSBuild

Step 2: Create your psake task file (database.upgrade.ps1)

Framework "4.0x64"

properties {
    $buildSolution = "Database.sqlproj"
    $targetServer = $parmTargetServer
    $targetDatabase = $parmTargetdatabase
    $databaseUsername = $parmDatabaseUsername
    $databasePassword = $parmDatabasePassword
}


task default -depends upgrade

task upgrade{

    Write-Host "Upgrading the $target_database database from $build_solution" 
        
    msbuild /target:clean`;build`;deploy 
                /p:UseSandboxSettings=false 
                /p:TargetDatabase=$targetDatabase 
                /p:TargetConnectionString=`"Data Source=$targetServer`;user id=$databaseUsername`;password=$databasePassword`;Pooling=False`" $buildSolution
    
}

**** Please not that the formatting of the MSBuild above will NOT RUN and is done to allow the sample code to be clean. You the entire MSBuild task needs to be on ONE LINE ****

**** I am setting my properties to ‘parm’ variables because I am passing these into the script by using the –parameters feature of psake ****

There is one part of the MSBuild task above that you MUST PAY ATTENTION TO, that is the way items are escaped. They are being escaped with the back tick (`). If you omit this you are going to get some odd errors depending on what you do. These errors could range from ‘Multiple projects were provided’ to issues with the connection string not being formatted. The root cause for these errors and the need to use the back tick (`) has to do with white space in the connection string… ugg

One you have this psake task setup you can call it like any other task and it should just work.

Till next time,

Deploying Asp.Net 4.5 site to IIS Error: ManagedRuntimeVersion to v.45

Derik Whittaker — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 14:28:46 GMT

Today I was trying to publish a Asp.net 4.5 site to our server and I received the following error;

The Application pool that you are trying to use has the ‘managedRuntimeVersion’ property set to v4.0. This application requires ‘v4.5’

I thought this was odd so I went to change the App pool, only to see there is no v4.5 option. After a bit of Goggling my suspicions about v4.5 not having an app pool as v4.5 of .net is inplace update and does not have a new ‘version’.

After a bit more Goggling and looking at StackoverFlow answers I found the solution, although it was not the ‘selected’ solution but oh well.

See I am doing my deploy via a powershell script using pSake and my deploy looked something like this

&$msBuildpath /verbosity:m $projectFileAndPath /T:Rebuild /T:Package /p:"Configuration=$buildMode;Packagelocation=$packageFolder"
/p:DeployOnBuild=True /p:DeployTarget=MsDeployPublish /p:CreatePackageOnPublish=True
/p:MSDeployPublishMethod=RemoteAgent /p:MSDeployServiceUrl=$deploymentServer /p:DeployIisAppPath=$deploymentAppPath
/p:UserName=$deployuser /p:Password=$deploypassword

What I needed to add was the /P:VisualStudioVersion=11.0 switch to force the right compiler. Once I added this switch my deploy was right as rain.

Till next time,

PSake and building Silverlight solutions

Derik Whittaker — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:02:17 GMT

If you are using PSake to build .net projects and your project has a silverlight project in it you may get the following error.

C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\Silverlight\v4.0\Microsoft.Silverlight.Common.targets(104,9): error : The Silverlight 4 SDK is not installed. [C:\Development\Source\Main\Libraries\SilverlightShared\Silverlight.csproj]

When I encountered this I was not sure what to do since I was telling PSake that I was building with the ‘–framework 4.0; option. However it appears that PSake does not look in the right path for the CORRECT MSBuild version. The way that I found to solve this problem was to fully qualify the version of MSBuild that I wanted to use. I did the following

C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\msbuild.exe /verbosity:m $SolutionFileWithPath

I have spoken with James (the author of PSake and he thinks he can have a fix for this) but just incase he does not get it or you have this problem now at least you know how to solve it.

Till next time,

From 0 to doing solution builds w/ PSake–Part 1 of N

Derik Whittaker — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 16:16:30 GMT

Recently I decided I would kill two birds with one stone, I figured I would learn a bit of Powershell and setup some build scripts for our project. I have been wanting to play around with Powershell for the longest time but could never really either find the time or the reason to play with it. So I figured that setting up build scripts would be a perfect use of my time (I know I could have choose any other build language/framework but PSake meet my need).

In this post I will walk you though how to setup a build from scratch. I will warn that because I am a COMPLETE NOOB with powershell it is very likely that my powershell code is less than optimal but it meets my needs.

In my script we are going to accomplish 3 things:

Setup a PSake Task to perform a clean on our solution
Setup a PSake Task to perform a build on our solution
Setup a PSake Task to run Tests in our solution

Before you continue I would suggest you download PSake and read the Readme.markdown script because this will tell you how to setup PSake to be run via Poweshell. Once you have read the markdown file you can continue.

Creating your shell ps1 file.

You will want to create a build file to put the following code into. Call it build.ps1 for our purposes.

Adding the Clean Task

The raw PSake ‘Task’ for the clean.

task Clean {
  Invoke-Clean "My Solution" "..\Subfolder\MySolution.sln"  
}

As you can see from the task above this is just a pass through call into another method called Invoke-Clean. I have done this because over time I expect to build out multiple build scripts, one per application, and I don’t want to duplicate the code which does a clean in each script.

Here is the actual Invoke-Clean function

function Invoke-Clean
{  [CmdletBinding()]
    param(
        [Parameter(Position=0,Mandatory=1)] [string]$BuildName = $null,
        [Parameter(Position=1,Mandatory=1)] [string]$SolutionFileWithPath = $null
        )
    
    Write-Host "Running Clean for" $BuildName "on Solution @" $SolutionFileWithPath
    
    C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\msbuild.exe /verbosity:m /t:Clean $SolutionFileWithPath
}

The code above is doing 2 things.

I an writing to the host (aka console) that I am running a clean for the given build
I am directly referencing the msbuild.exe from the folder. Now with PSake you don’t always have to do this because it just ‘knows’ where msbuild is located. However, I am building a silverlight app and the version of msbuild that PSake was finding was wrong and this was my solution for this.

Adding the Compile Tasks

When doing a compile we are going to simply call out to MSBuild and allow it to do its thing. Below is the PSake task for doing a compile

task Compile -depends Clean {
  
  Invoke-Build "My solution" "..\Subfolder\MySolution.sln"  
    
}

Again the task above is just wrapper call around the Invoke-Build function. It is the Invoke-Build function which is doing all the heavy lifting. Below is our function.

It is important to point out that our Compile task depends on the Clean task. This means that the Clean task will be run prior to the actual compile.

function Invoke-Build
{  
    [CmdletBinding()]
    param(
        [Parameter(Position=0,Mandatory=1)] [string]$BuildName = $null,
        [Parameter(Position=1,Mandatory=1)] [string]$SolutionFileWithPath = $null
        )
    
    Write-Host "Running Build for" $BuildName "on Solution @" $SolutionFileWithPath
    
    C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\msbuild.exe /verbosity:m $SolutionFileWithPath
}

The Invoke-Build above is also calling to a specific version of the MSBuild but this time rather than doing a clean it is doing a compile. Of course if you want to perform more actions via MSBuild you can find the full list of command line switches on MSDN.

Adding the Test Tasks

The last task I want to build is the testing task. Because our team is using MSTest the code below is for this. if you are using NUnit or any other testing framework the code should be close to this but of course calling the correct runner exe.

task Test -depends Compile, Clean {
  
  Invoke-MSTest "MyTestDll.dll" "..\Subfolder\UnitTests\bin\Debug\MyUnitTests.dll" "MyUnitTests.dll.trx"     
  
}

Our Test task above is pretty simple. We are passing in 3 values, Display name, the dll to test and because this is MSTest I am providing the name of the output file I want generated with the test results.

Below is the implementation for Invoke-MSTest.

function Invoke-MSTest
{
  [CmdletBinding()]
    param(
        [Parameter(Position=0,Mandatory=1)] [string]$TestName = $null,
        [Parameter(Position=1,Mandatory=1)] [string]$TestDll = $null,
        [Parameter(Position=2,Mandatory=1)] [string]$ResultTrx = $null
        )
        
    Write-Host "Running Tests for" $TestName "Located @" $TestDll " Output to:" $ResultTrx
    
    
    if ( Test-Path $ResultTrx )       
    {
        Write-Host "Found" $ResultTrx "it will be deleted prior to running the test"
        Remove-Item $ResultTrx
    }       
    
    $result = mstest /testcontainer:$TestDll /resultsfile:$ResultTrx
       
    foreach( $line in $result )
    {
        if ( $line -ne $null )
        {
            if ( $line.StartsWith("Passed") -ne $true )
            {
                $line
            }
        }
    }
}

Looking at the Invoke-MSTest function above you can see I am doing more than simply making a call out to MSTest. I am doing 2 specific things.

I am checking to see if there is an existing output file and if there is I am deleting it
I am only outputting the failure test results to the console. This allows me to remove all the extra noise of passed tests.

As you can see from above getting up and running w/ PSake is not that hard and does not take much effort.

Till next time,