Question is plain and simple:
I want to publish my latest version to selected users for beta testing. Is there any quick and dirty way to do the same.
Here is the link that I found in MSDN which is bit old and suggesting an approach but I dont think i need to put this much effort. Rather I will just use a different installer for beta testing.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480721.aspx[^]
I think you should create a new site with a different publish URL. It is the most manageable option I can think of. Users connect to that site and download the beta version and could run it in parallel with another version for comparison purposes.
You are going to have two versions of the client application so you are going to have two installers; I don't think you can get around that. Having multiple publish URLs means people don't have to uninstall/re-install the app to get the "right version".
Embrace MAGE and script it out.
Related
Does anyone experiment in creating salesforce Package.xml automatically for continuous integration? If there any script or some idea please share.
You know incremental package.xml helps to deploy only the modified files rather than using complete package.xml that redeploy unmodified files as well which takes a lot of time.
Thanks in advance!
Tricky. And not really a programming-related problem, consider cross-posting this to https://salesforce.stackexchange.com/ or maybe even https://devops.stackexchange.com/
I don't think there's no clear answer, you'll have to experiment. Especially that you tagged "migration tool" (so old-school, battle-tested but lower priority Metadata API; seems that all focus is now on SFDX style of deployments). Do you use any version control (ideally Git) or do you hope to somehow compare source & target org, figure out the deltas and deploy only them?
Remember that often SF gets better at detecting "no changes" with every release (how old is your migration tool's jar file?). For example when I deploy my current project to an empty sandbox (exact copy of prod, no custom objects, code etc yet) the initial deploy takes ~7 minutes. But any subsequent deploy with same content or slight changes takes just 3-4. So try to calculate time lost in the grand scheme of things and decide what gains you want to see / how much time you want to spend on experimenting and tweaking the solution.
You could look into dedicated deployment solutions such as Gearset, Autorabit, Odaseva (I'm not affiliated with either and this list is not exhaustive). They often are capable of running a comparison for you.
There are several projects that try to compose package.xml based on Git diff(erence) between two commits. Of course you need to have a repo first and some regime:
https://github.com/cloudsandbox/sfdx-gen-pack saw presentation about it at Cloudforce London 2019
https://github.com/Accenture/sfpowerkit seems to have a "diff" command (disclaimer: I used to work for Accenture but not affiliated now, haven't worked on the tool, haven't used it personally)
https://cumulusci.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ this seems to be interesting and mature. Built by SF employees, not an official tool but used to CI deploy the non-profit packages they build (maybe you heard about Non Profit Starter Pack, especially if you ever considered enabling Person Accounts). I'm not sure if they do delta deployments as such but there seems to be a command that updates package.xml with files in repository so it's a start? https://cumulusci.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial.html#part-4-running-tasks
I'm not saying CumulusCI will be a silver bullet but out of these 3 seems to be most actively maintained ;) But sounds like you'd have to get familiar with SFDX (if not whole thing then at least commands to convert the project back and forth between "source" (SFDX) structure and Metadata API structure
Answering my question by myself: I found git diff master feature/vat | force-dev-tool changeset create vat working!
Thanks to Roman answered in https://salesforce.stackexchange.com/questions/184332/is-there-a-pre-build-solution-for-generating-a-package-xml-from-a-git-repo
This is a subject of common discussion, but through all my research I have not actually found a sound answer to this.
I develop my websites offline, and then launch them live through my hosting account.
I utilize codeigniter, and on that basis there are some fundamental differences between my offline and online copies, namely base urls and database configurations. As such I cannot simply develop and test my websites offline and then upload them as it requires small configuration changes which are easy to overlook and good lead to a none working live website.
The other factor is that when I am developing offline, I might add a database table or a column whilst creating some functionality. When I upload my local developments to my host, they often do not work as I have forgotten to upload the new database structure. Obviously this cannot happen - there cannot be any opportunity for a damaged or broken live website.
Further to this, I'd like to be able to have logs of my development - version control of sorts such that if i develop a feature, and then something else stops working I can easily look backwards to at least see the code changes which could have caused the change.
My fourth requirement is as follows: if i go away on holiday for a week without my development laptop, and then get a bug report, I have no way of fixing it. If i fix it on the live copy, not only is it dangerous, but i'll inevitably not update it on my local copy - as such when i update my live copy next time, that change will be lost. Is there a way that on any computer i can access my development setup, edit and test, launch to the live site, whilst also committing it such that my laptop local copy is up to date.
So yes.. in general im looking for a solution to make my development processes more efficient/suitable. Any ideas?
Thanks
Don't deploy by simply copying. Deploy by using a script (I use Apache Ant) that will automate the copy of specific files for each environment, the replacement of some values, etc.
This just needs rigor. Make a todo list while developing, and check that every modification on the server is done. You might also test the deploy procedure on a pre-production server which has an similar configuration as the production server, make sure everything is OK, and then apply the same, tested procedure on the production server
Just use a version control system. SVN or Git are two free candidates.
Make your version control server available from anywhere. If it's an open-source project, free hosting solutions exist. Of course, if you don't have a development computer wvailable, you'll have to checkout the whole project, and probably install some tools to be able to develop, test and deploy. Just try to make it as easy as possible, or always have your laptop available. If you plan to work, have your toolbox with you. If you don't plan to work, then don't work. When you have finished some development, commit to the server. When you go back to your laptop, update your working copy from the server.
Small additions and clarifications to JB
Use any VCS, which can work (in a good way) with branches - your local and prod systems are good candidates for separate branches, where you share common code but have branch-specific config. It'll require some changes in your everyday workflow (code in "test", merge finished with "prod", deploy /by tools, not hand/ only after merge...), but it's fair price
Changing of workflow, again. As JB noted - don't deploy by hand, don't deploy wrong branch, don't deploy "prod" before finished merge. But now build-tools are rather smart, you can check such pre-condition inside builder
Just use VCS, maybe DVCS will be somehow better. I say strong "No-no" for Git as first VCS, but you have wide choice even without it - SVN (poor branch|merge comparing to DVCS), Bazaar (not a tool of my dream, but, who knows), Mercurial, Fossil SCM, Monotone
Don't work on live, never do anyting outside your SCM. One source of changes is a rule of happy developer. Or don't work at all at free-time, or have codebase always reacheable for you (free code-hosting /GoogleCode, SourceForge, BitBucket, Github, Assembla, LaunchPad/ or own server), get it as needed, change, save, deploy
I am currently investigating possible options of a migration framework/tool. I like the idea of ruby migrations on which the above frameworks are based.
So I am asking for your experience, opinions and maybe a comparison between them. Are you using them in production?
thanks for responses. The goal of this question was to get a feeling about which tools is used most in the developer community but it seems that migrations are not a hot topic here.
Anyway, I have decided to go with MigSharp as the codebase seem to be pretty clean and it is quite easy to handle and had build in support for MS SQL CE. Second runner up would have been FluentMigrator where I was not able to produce a working example for compact edition.
Cheers
I use FluentMigrator in production, and am a longtime contributor to FM. I think your question is to general; be more specific. Also, FM has a google group which is fairly active if you want FM information.
FM is derived from migrator.net, as I recall. It uses a fluent-syntax, and supports multiple databases. We have taken some inspiration from rails migrations, but it's definitely not a port. Worth checking out.
One thing I've learned is not to put your migrations in the same assembly as you app code. Separate them into a migration assembly, and use that for migrating your databases.
Also, you should always work on multiple environments to avoid problems with migrations run straight against production. I always have at least a development and production environment, and most of the time there is a testing environment as well.
I use mig#.
It works well, but you will need to have some guidelines for usage - as migrations can get complicated.
We use sequence number on the end of our migrations rather than a date-time stamp. This is because we don't know when the date time stamp was set (when they begun the source code change-set; just before committing; some time inbetween) different developers could use different approaches.
Names such as Migration_0000034.cs give you plenty of space.
At this point, I would stick with migrator.net. I like the promise of FluentMigrator, but it seems to not have any better active development than migrator.net (see the issues and pull requests that have languished on their github site).
There is also no easy way to do an ExecuteScalar(). I'd add it, but I don't want to create my own fork, and I see no reason that a pull request would actually land in the master. (Execute.WithConnection is an Action so it will fire on demand rather than when I need it to fire)
So for me, I'm heading back to migrator.net.
Is there a simple and automatic way of checking if a visitor to my website (written in asp.net) is using the latest version of his browser? This would allow me to display a message to inform them that they're running an old version and that they might want to upgrade.
My website is tested on most broswers but I don't test old versions (such as Internet Explorer 6 etc). When one of my visitors is using such an old version, basically, I would like to encourage (not force) them to upgrade.
Of course I could do this myself by getting the version of the browser and look it up in my database but I don't want to have to maintain a 'browser version' database myself.
Any ideas?
Speaking as a user of websites, if I come across a site that advised me to upgrade my browser then that would be an immediate black mark against that site.
I might not be able to upgrade (if I'm accessing from a corporate network for example); I might have a specific reason for using a particular version (if I'm a web developer wanting to ensure compatibility with my user community for example).
So personally, I would say that a blanket disclaimer that you don't test this site on earlier versions would be the way to go. That's quite apart from the technical challenge of what you want to do.
Edit: as Yeti points out, however valid my concerns, I don't answer the question directly. This is done in Pace's answer, and the w3schools resource he points to gives you what you need to do this on the client side.
When creating an auto updating feature for a .NET WinForms application, how does it update the DLLs and not affect the currently running application?
Since the application is running during the update process, won't there be a lock on the DLLs (because those DLLs will have to be overwritten during the update).
Usually you would download the new files into a separate area. Then shutdown and restart and at startup you look for and use the new files if found. Always keeping a last known working version on the side so that the user can revert to something that definitely works if the download causes problems.
ClickOnce is a good technology from Microsoft that does this for you and you can use it directly from Visual Studio 2008.
You'll have to shutdown your application and restart it, as other people have already commented.
I wrote an open-source code to do just that in a transparent mode - including an external update application to do the actual cold update. See http://www.code972.com/blog/2010/08/nappupdate-application-auto-update-framework-for-dotnet/
The code is at http://github.com/synhershko/NAppUpdate (Licensed under the Apache 2.0 license)
I have a seperate 'launcher' application that checks for updates via a web service. If there are updates, it downloads them and then executes my application, which is in a seperate assembly.
The other alternatives are using things like ClickOnce, or downloading the files to a seperate area and restarting the app, as someone else mentioned.
Be warned about ClickOnce, though - it's not as flexible as it sounds. And if you deploy to a system that requires elevating your program to a higer security level to run, you might run into problems if you don't have a certificate for your app installed. I found it very difficult to get straight answers on the Internet to things like certificate management when it comes to ClickOnce. If you have a complex app, you may want to just roll your own updater, which is what I ended up having to do.
If you publish via ClickOnce, all of that tends to be handled for you. It has it's own pro's and con's but usually easier than trying to code it all yourself.
Both Wikipedia and 15seconds have decent info on using ClickOnce, how it works, etc.
As others have stated, ClickOnce isn't as flexible as rolling your own solution but it is a LOT less complicated. It has a small learning curve at first, but with pretty much everything bundled into Visual Studio and the use of Wizards, it usually doesn't take long to stumble onto a working solution.
As deployments get more complex (i.e. beyond than just having prerequisites or application code that needs updating) and you need to do a lot of post-install or pre-install tasks, there are things like WiX which give you somewhat of a hybrid solution between Windows Installer and ClickOnce, with the cost of flexibility being a much steeper learning curve.
The only reason I try to avoid custom installers is that you end up spending way too much time trying to get it just right to handle a bunch of different "What If" scenarios...
These days Windows can do such updates automatically for you with AppInstaller if your app is packaged in the MSIX package.
It downloads the new version of the app in another folder inside ProgramFiles\WindowsApps, then when a user runs the app via the start menu, the system knows what folder it should use. The previous version gets deleted when not in use.
If you want to know how to package your app this way I collected my findings in this answer.