Creating new websites using TFS Release Management

When you use TFS Release Management server to deploy your builds to various (and you really should because it's awesome), you might have tried to get it to do all kinds of stuff like automate Windows operations, IIS actions, registry modifications, services manipulations and so on and so forth. Beautiful, right? Yes, I like it too. Release Management is a great piece of software that will not get better. And, in an effort, to make this software better, I wanted to share a small bug I have discovered in the software.

When you use Create Website action to create a new website in IIS, Release Management seem to create website just fine, but if you look closer you might notice a bug. When Release Management action created a website in IIS, it will misconfigure physical path assigned to the website. Unless you set IsAutoStart option to true, and leave IsPreloadEnabled option blank (unless, of course, you use IIS8 or better.) The reason why this is happening is that when Release Management action creates a website it is using iisconfig.exe command. And, for some reason, it's messing up the syntax unless you set those two options. So, for now, just set set IsAutoStart option to true, and leave IsPreloadEnabled option blank. And, hopefully, Microsoft will fix that bug in the future release…