My question is similar to this one, which remained unanswered, unfortunately.
We are rolling out a web application as a web deployment package (Web Deploy/MSdeploy) to different environments. The package is created from within Visual Studio 2012/Team Build. Several parameters are to be set at install time (connection strings, WCF endpoints, logging settings, etc.). We have these in a parameters.xml at the root of the project.
Most of our customers import the package through IIS UI. Each time we roll out an update, customer IIS administrators have to provide the parameter values again through the UI. Most of the time, parameters do not change across updates.
What is the best way to handle this? Advise customer IIS administrators to use the command-line instead, injecting a SetParameters.xml that they keep separately (the level of some of our customer administrators isn't particularly high, so having something UI-based which we can document with a couple of screenshots is an advantage)? Keep the settings file (web.config or appconfig) out of the package altogether? What is the neatest way to do this?
I had the same problem, but decided to go with the batch-script installer file that comes with the web deploy package. In my mind it is more secure, doing this installation by script, instead of having to install through GUI. It can be documented, and maybe they need to learn a little bit of command-line?
As you say, they can use the same SetParameters-file for all following releases, if nothing in it changed - which in my mind is a huge benifit - not having to manage web.configs manually.
Automated deploys minimizes manual errors.