What to use for application deployment?

[Guest]

I have a couple of web sites, some web services and some windows services
that I need to deploy to our production servers. We used to use NANT with the
VS 2003 applications. Now that we are using VS 2005, I am looking at all
available deployment options. So far, I see:

1) NANT
2) MSBuild
3) Web Deployment Projects (built on MSBuild)
4) Custom powershell scripts
5) VS.Net 2005 Team System, Developer edition (Handles build only, not
deployment, utilises MSBuild)

It seems that NANT is not yet fully supporting VS 2005, which is a worry. MS
Build looks like it could be promising, but I have heard that it is not as
feature rich as NANT. Web Deployment Projects as far as I can tell just makes
it easier to configure MSBuild for a web app. And NANT could work, but may be
re-inventing the wheel.

What is the general consensus on the best tools for application deployment?

Thanks
David

 

[Guest]

"And NANT could work, but may be re-inventing the wheel."
should read
"And Powershell scripts could work, but may bere-inventing the wheel."

 

[bruce barker \(sqlwork.com\)]

vs2005 has no real deployment support. it will build a staging folder, or a
msi.

to roll you own, you really have nant, msbuild or a custom script. if you
are using team suite or not unit testing(shame, shame), then you probably
should use msbuild instead of nant.

note: having team, I switched from nant/nuint to msbuild, but still use
cruise control. also had good luck with database deployments with team
database (beta)

-- bruce (sqlwork.com)