I hate updating

I have found that going from one version of BDD/MS Deployment is a pain. If you are starting out with MS Deployment then you are ahead of the game by quite a bit. Moving over from BDD to the beta for Deployment was quite a bit of a hassle for me -- it took a couple days to get my deployments "stable" again. Upgrading from MSD beta to MSD beta took about an afternoon (and most of that had to do with a custom script).

One of my biggest issues that I faced when I was upgrading the first time from BDD to MSD was that I wanted to go from hosting the deployment point on my local machine to hosting it on a server. I was just playing when I first started with BDD and thus I hosted the files off my local machine. When I upgraded I figured it was about time to put them somewhere where more people could get to it to help me test.

Something that I was not aware of -- either because I failed to read it, or it wasn't ever stated -- is that you need to have a "local" deployment point for BDD/MSD and a "network" deployment point, and those should not be the same points. I started seeing some very weird things when I was trying to have my "local" and "network" deployment points at the same point. I was mapping a drive and also "publishing" to the same point. From what I can gather that does not work. I would see things disappear for no reason.

I don't really recall what all my problems were that I was seeing but I cured most all of them when I remade a local deployment point (or file store if you will) and then published to my network deployment point.

Another issue that I had when I upgraded is that I tried to reuse the same exact folder structure and just have MSD rebuild over the top of that. MSD did not really like that and I started to get several of the same files in different places and I had to figure out what files were actually driving the process. That was a big pain.

The last time that I upgraded MSD I backed up both my local and network deployment point and then uninstalled MSD and installed the new version. I then had the new version of MSD create the new local and network deployment points. This worked out a lot better for me. I had to copy my Vista install wim and applications over again, but compared to tracking down what file is messing me up where that saved me a lot of time.