Other tools we use in conjunction with TFS

While TFS can do a lot of things, I thought I'd share a list of tools we're using (or just looking at) in conjunction with TFS for our full "Build and Deploy" solution.

- PSTools - We use this fine set of tools for executing deployment scripts on remote machines. Once Power Shell allows this ability (I think it's coming in 2.0) we might look at using Power Shell for our remote communication. In the mean time PSTools will work though we are getting some output from Psexec which is hanging MSBuild's Exec task.

- Power Shell 1.0 - While I'm not a shell expert, from what I've found Power Shell seems to be a great upgrade from CMD. We've changed all our deployment scripts to use Power Shell for the basis.

- AppCMD - We use AppCMD (pronounced App Command by the Microsoft person I talked to last week) is a command line interface for IIS 7.0. Instead of using our home grown tool for writing to the IIS meta-base (which we did with IIS 5/6) we're using AppCMD. Now since IIS 7.0 does not have the concept of a meta-base, we could just xcopy the applicationHost.config file over and call it a day. However, we're currently hosting multiple applications on the box and don’t want one deployment to bring down all apps. By using AppCMD to purge/pave our IIS 7.0 configuration, we scope the downtime to the application we're trying to deploy.

- IIS 7.0 and Tomcat - Our ASP.NET apps are running under IIS 7.0 (as you would guess) and our Java applications are running under Tomcat.

- Altiris Deployment Sever and Altiris Software Delivery System - So our deployment runs fine one a machine or two, but we need something that will execute the deployment on 1000+ machines all at the same time. Altiris has a couple of different products we're looking at to do this. Basically, this would remove our need for the Psexec tool from PSTools and our FTP Tasks in Ant we use to deploy a WAR file to Tomcat.

I know, I know this has very little to do with TFS, but we do hook the tools into TFS (and vice-versa) so I thought I'd share it with you.