Need a way to set deployment package at Project level

mwoffenden

To facilitate re-use of projects, users of DM need a way to set the deployment package at the project level and have it cascade down to all the steps.

Currently it's painful to re-use a project, since each step must be updated by hand.

Has this feature been considered for a near term release?

csmith

Hi

Thanks for taking the time to give us so much feedback on Deployment Manager.

That feature is not currently on our planned roadmap, as we've not had it requested before. In order for us to better understand your 'use-case' could you please let us know a little more about why this would be useful and how you currently have to work?

It would also be great if you could add you idea to our UserVoice forum so other DM users can vote for and add comments to your request. We do want to deliver the most requested features on there, for instance, we have just started work on the idea with the highest number of votes - adding Windows Authentication support.

Thanks again for your feedback on DM.

Best regards,
Chris

mwoffenden

csmith wrote:

...please let us know a little more about why this would be useful...

Thanks for your note. Based on some new knowledge of DM I gained recently, my initial request may be moot, although I do have a follow up suggestion.

Somewhere along the way I missed the fact that DM actually does know about NuGet package versions ... and that I may retain the same package name, and as long as I give it a new version, DM knows about this. However I think that the user interface (and product documentation for that matter) is rather unclear about this, because only at the point of creating a Release does the UI display the list of known package versions.

My follow up suggestion: I wonder if the concept of package versions, and precisely how they are used in DM, could be better revealed in the UI -- and the documentation? This would benefit those in the user community who, like myself, have not used NuGet packages before.

csmith

Hi

Glad you've discovered how to choose the version of a package that you'd like to release. Yes, we'd expect the name of the package specified in a project 'step' to be constant and the package version to be incremented with every release. DM polls your package feed looking for versions of the package and lists those in the package version drop-down list in the 'Create Release' dialog.

Looking at this afresh, I can see that the Create Steps UI and the relevant documentation does not call this out. So, thanks for drawing our attention to it.

Best regards,
Chris

mwoffenden

csmith wrote:

I can see that the Create Steps UI and the relevant documentation does not call this out.

Thanks. Can we expect to see this improved in the future?

csmith

Hi

Yes, I think so. I've asked one of the team to look into how we might improve the documentation around specifying package versions.

Best regards,
Chris

mwoffenden

csmith wrote:

how we might improve the documentation

That's good, but it's almost more important to get some visual indicators into the UI. Will your team look at that as well?

csmith

Sure, we'll be thinking about how to direct users to the documentation during typical usage.