Building PowerUp – the Behind the Scenes “Making Of” Mini-Series

Welcome. Stick Around If You Want To Automate Your Deployments

Until recently, I was working at BBC Worldwide (working on such websites as Top Gear). Like any big development house, we produced a lot of software, and had a fairly sizable chunk of infrastructure to support these systems.

I learnt an important lesson during these years – software should be built, tested and deployed automatically. To do this manually invites chaos, uncertainty, fear and distraction into our working lives. Its frustrating and it deserves to be left in the past.

PowerUp is my attempt to bake the lessons I have learnt about automated deployments into a neat, well organised, complete (but extensible) nugget of goodness. I hope many people find it to be useful and empowering. I also hope at least a few are inspired enough to join in and contribute.

Now then….

I’m going to unroll what myself and the folks at Affinity ID have done as a series of blog posts.

Of course PowerUp is ready to use now, you dont need to wait. For the impatient, please visit the PowerUp GitHub Repository and follow the current quickstart guide.

Upcoming posts

These are the topics I hope to cover. I’m going to tackle these one every fews days, roughly top to bottom (pending any demand otherwise). They vary between the how and the why, and also little focussed snippets of particular technical problems we solved. Each will be made into a hyperlink when the post is up.

Using PowerUp

• The PowerUp Glossy Sales Brochure
• PowerUp Quickstart
• A Rundown of what the PowerUp Quickstart Does
• How To Use PowerUp in Your Deployments
• How To Know If PowerUp is Right For You
• The Internal Anatomy Of PowerUp
• Extending PowerUp – Choices

The Design Of PowerUp

• Creating a Well Organise Build, With Nant or MSBuild
• The Challenge Of Configuration Files Requiring Different Settings Per Environment
• Choosing a Deployment Scripting Language For Windows
• Using PSake To Structure Deployments
• Configuring Powershell to Run .Net 4 Cmdlets, and Other Challenges
• Running PSake Tasks Remotely With Both PSExec and Powershell Remoting
• Executing PSExec Within Powershell
• How To Enable Powershell Remoting With A Single Script
• Powershell Integration With Continuous Integration
• Deploying Umbraco with Courier and Powershell
• File Copying In Powershell – Why Robocopy Still Holds Its Own
• Basic IIS 7 Configuration In Powershell
• SSL Certificate Configuration In Powershell
• Unit Testing Powershell Scripts
• Conspicuously Unused Tools – MSDeploy, Visual Studio Configuration Transformations
• The Future Of PowerUp

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