LightSwitch Beta Deployment
Jun
13
Written by:
Monday, June 13, 2011
Recently, I had to develop an admin interface to a web application. I thought I would use Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch, as this seems to be the compelling use case.
The experience building the application was very pleasant, and the resulting application was streets better than what I expected. The early user experience was (and I quote), “WOOT WOOT”.
However the deployment experience I had was not so good, and I banged my head against the door for a number of days trying to get the application hosted on a virtual server.
Publish Options
You have 2 supported publish options – direct publish from Visual Studio, or develop a ‘Web Deploy Package’.
I think most developers will end up using the package, however I tinkered with the direct publish initially and found no joy. I think Enterprise Developers may end up using this option, however I struggled to get this too work (you might have another experience).
Generating a package is pretty straight forward.
Troubleshooting
- Check the web.config on the production server
- Check the connection strings and sql permissions
- Web Deploy. LightSwitch Beta 2 uses the Web Deploy 1.1 library. Currently shipping is Web Deploy 2.0. I found I had to completely remove Web Deploy 2.0 (through Remove Programmes, AND the Server ‘Features’ setting), before installing Web Deploy 1.1 through the Web Platform Installer. Apparently the install order is important (Note: I haven’t gone back and re-installed Web Deploy 2.0 to see if this breaks the install process).
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