I've got a TFS build set up to build and deploy a web application. I'm passing in the MSDeploy parameters via the TFS build definition's MSBuild arguments. First time round this is working fine. When someone accesses the web app, one of the controls (Microsoft charting control) generates a couple of files in an empty directory I've added to the solution.
When I go to rebuild (or continuous integration is triggered) the next build will usually fail because it can't delete one of the generated files. When I try and manually delete the file it tells me that IIS worker process is using it and it can't be deleted.
Now to get the build building I'd have to manually restart IIS every time, which is not desirable with CI in mind. I've taken a look through Microsoft.Web.Publishing.Tasks.dll and there's nothing there to restart IIS using MSDeploy.
At the moment I'm thinking that adding stubs of the temporary files in the solution might be a resolution (maybe MSDeploy will be able to close the process if the file is a permanent part of the deployment) or I could do some unpleasantness with Exec in the solution file to get an IIS reset.
It's probably a long shot but has anyone come up against this and found a nice solution?
You could use MSBuild Extension Pack to stop the application pool automatically before deployment. There are several tasks in the MSBuild.ExtensionPack.Web namespace to manage IIS, such as stopping and starting an application pool, deleting an application, etc.