The PowerUp Glossy Sales Brochure

Here is a quick run down of what PowerUp is, and what its good point are.

The Vacuous Sales Pitch

Powerup is a build and deployment framework utilizing Nant, MSBuild, Powershell and Psake. It makes the automation of build and deployments possible for anyone – not just for new projects, but also legacy manual builds. It is designed quickly allow easy things (ie there are lots of sensible defaults), but flexible enough to be extended to do much harder things (the architecture is completely open for extension).

PowerUp doesn’t require you to invest in “its way”. The PowerUp way is probably what you are doing already, but with some structure and helpers to make it fully automated.

The Concrete Details

Here is what PowerUp actually does.

First of all, it helps you easily create a simple package of your solution. That is, it provides Nant and MSBuild files that compile your solution (if needed) then copy all the required files into one location. It then zips this all up.

Secondly, it provides the mechanisms to script your deployments. This includes:

• A scheme for storing your environment specific settings in a single plain text file, which is then substituted into templated config files. No more multiple copies of your web.config files for each environment. Or worse, having to use VS2010 config substitutions.
• Lots of Powershell modules to perform common deployment tasks. This includes configuring IIS, copying files and deploying Umbraco Courier revisions (with many, many more planned).
• A framework that allows you to seamlessly distribute your deployment over any combination of remote servers. Specifically, this means a way of selectively running your psake deploy tasks on remote machines.

It integrates easily into CI (Bamboo and Teamcity already tested).

It doesn’t limit what you can do during deployment – any Powershell is allowed.

If you don’t like how something is done, you can change it. This includes how the settings are read, how tasks are executed remotely.

If you want to use msdeploy, you can

If you want to build your package in something other than Nant and MSBuild, that is fine as well

Closing Pitch

The central theme is: With PowerUp, you will be able to do almost everything out of the box without having to think. But when you want to get stuck in and change things, you will be able to.

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