title: Deployment of Microsoft stack apps without reinventing the wheel
body: <p>We have the following three things we need to deploy to a Windows Server 2008 farm:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>ASP.NET MVC 4 web applications (x3)</li>
  <li>.NET Windows services (x2)</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>I have inherited the deploy process and would like to rewrite it.</p>
  
  <h2>Web Applications</h2>
  
  <p>When I am in Visual Studio 2012 I have a nice new publishing wizard for deploying web applications. Can this be used somehow? Or taken advantage of in anyway?</p>
  
  <h2>Windows Services</h2>
  
  <p>Windows Services are Windows Services, so deploying them to a Windows Server should be simple. Right?!</p>
  
  <p>Then there is how to deal with the fact we are deploying to a <em>farm</em> of Windows Server 2008 machines, not just one.</p>
  
  <p>Everyone I talk to seems to have to reinvent a new, custom and complex process that is difficult to maintain and not very malleable, often with custom XML files with all sorts of actions etc that are hand edited. Even psexec gets involved a lot - this smells wrong to me.</p>
  
  <p>Given that at least for the service and the web applications we <em>are doing nothing special whatsoever</em>, what is the simplest way to have a nice, potentially VCS commitable publishing process.</p>
  
  <p>Apologies if this is a ridiculous question, if so please help me understand why!</p>
  
  <p>To be a question on here though, it needs to be answerable. So to summise: what is the easiest/an easy way to deploy web applications and windows services to a farm of Windows Server 2008 machines?</p>