Enterprise deployment of an Ektron web site

I am currently helping a customer who is using Visual Studio 2012 with TFS 2010 to deploy an Ektron 9.0 CMS application using a .Net 4.5 web site project – not a web application project. Currently Ektron, do not have a Web Application project. This series of blogs will be the learning's that we undertake to get this into production using Continuous Delivery. We will not be discussing the customer or the actual application, but rather the technical problems that are solved along the journey with this chosen technology stack. Yes, we would love to migrate to TFS 2013 and Release Management, but at this stage this has been ruled out.

We will hopefully tackle the following areas on our journey

  1. Create a WebDeploy packge from an Ektron web site project in TFS 2010
  2. Utilise Parameters.xml in a web site project to pull out environment differences
  3. Utilise Blue Green Deployment using WebDeploy
  4. Nightly deployment to development server in a different domain
  5. Ad Hoc deployment to SystemTest via Microsoft Test Manager
  6. Promotion to UAT by the test team

Now once we have all the pieces of the puzzle we should be in a good state to leverage Release Management. Please feel free to comment if you have done any of these steps before.