At last a new CTP has shipped of EPiServer CMS 5 Release 2, which can be found here. Included in this version is the EPiServer Manager replacement, the EPiServer Installation Manager (it took us weeks to come up with that name :-))
We decided early on in the development that we wanted to have an installation and management system that was flexible and could be extended by our partners. We chose Windows Installer XML (Wix) as the technology to generate our Windows Installer MSI files with, as this supports the Team Foundation Server build environment that we use. We also chose the Windows PowerShell scripting language as the technology we would use when creating, manipulating and deleting EPiServer web sites.
EPiServer CMS 5 R2 will be shipped as product packages. Each package will normally contain a number of MSI files, some redistribution packages for Windows PowerShell for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista, some packages for activating Windows PowerShell and IIS on Windows Server 2008 using the Windows Package Manager and a bootstrapper setup.exe application. Note: It is important to use the setup.exe application when installing and not launch the individual MSI files themselves. The setup.exe not only executes the MSI's and packages in the correct order but does other important stuff such as pre-requisite checking.
Just as with the EPiServer CMS 5 Release 1, R2 installs itself in the Program Files folder under EPiServer. On 64 bit operating systems it will be installed in the Program Files (x86) folder. This does not mean that EPiServer sites can only run as 32 bit applications. Under the EPiServer folder you should find two sub-folders, Shared and CMS. The Shared folder contains the EPiServer Windows Services and the new EPiServer Installation Manager (more on this later). The CMS folder will contain a sub-folder for each version of EPiServer CMS 5 R2 installed.
EPiServer Installation Manager
The new EPiServer Installation Manager is basically a script browser. It looks in a configurable folder for versions of EPiServer CMS 5 R2 and then enumerates all the PowerShell scripts it finds.
Figure 1. The EPiServer Installation Manager
To run a script simply select it in the tree and click the Run button or double-click it. Once a script starts to run, a progress window will be shown. Depending on the task, a wizard window may also be shown to allow you to input information for the selected task.
Figure 2. The progress window for a running script
Figure 3. The "Install Site (SqlServer)" wizard
Once the wizard has finished, the script continues with the task in hand. All of the scripts except "Start Services" use our new powerful Installation API. This consists of a .NET based class library (EPiServerInstall.Core.dll) and a set of PowerShell cmdlets built on top of it.
Over the next few days, I will try to write more about the architecture of the new installation system and how you as a partner developers can extend it to install and manipulate the modules and extensions you write for EPiServer CMS 5.