James Simmonds

First, some history... The advent of NuGet has revolutionised many many aspects of the .Net ecosystem; MyGet, Chocolatey & OctopusDeploy to name a few solutions building upon its success bring even more features to the table. I also spotted that NuGet could solve a problem I was having with my OSS System Monitoring software Wolfpack ; essentially this is a core application framework that uses plugins for extension ( Wolfpack Contrib ) but how to unify, standardise and streamline how these plugins are made available? NuGet to the rescue again - I wrapped the NuGet infrastructure (I deem NuGet to be so ubiquitous and stable that is has transcended into the software "infrastrucuture" hall of fame) with a new OSS project called Sidewinder . Sidewinder allows me to wrap all my little extension and plugins in NuGet packages and deploy them directly from the Wolfpack application - it even allows me to issue a new version of Wolfpack and have Wolfpack update itself, sweet huh...

[Update 19th Apr 2012]  - mission complete!...v2.4.0 of Wolfpack has been released and this includes a new set of plugins that can automatically download a NuGet package then execute a deployment tool (eg: DropkicK, MSBuild.exe) - it can even run NUnit tests (via the console runner). Wolfpack v2.4.0 Wolfpack.Contrib.Deployment [Original Post] Another day, another project and deployment raises its head... Thinking that this problem must have been cracked by now I had a look around the .Net landscape and found two interesting solutions. Octopus Deploy - a .Net convention based deployment system using NuGet packages, loosely based on AppHarbour's approach. DropkicK (aka DK) - another awesome initiative from Dru Sellers et al. I like the simplicity of Octopus but also like DK's  fluent code based deployment. Hmmm, this has got me thinking - Wolfpack could easily be adapted to be used as a deployment agent. Wolfpack can already monitor a NuGet feed for new pac...

I'm reading Continuous Delivery (CD) at the moment and it's a thought provoking read and provides a great opportunity to reflect on your own deployment and delivery problems (oh come on, you have some too right?). A couple of recent deployment incidents of our own prompted me into action.  Introducing " Declarative Deployment Verification Tests " - or DDVT So what is this? Essentially it boils down to approaching deployment scripts as you would a development task - test first - and places the responsibility of defining the deployment success on the developer, who as the person creating the software, should be best placed to understand it's deployment requirements. That's the basic premise - define the success of the deployment up front in the form of unit tests in your favourite test framework, write the deployment scripts - rinse and repeat until you have all greens from dev to production environments. I believe the magic ingredient though is the 'declar...