Towards documenting deployment best practices

Marc Brooks writes up an exhaustive account of the tools and practices he uses for enterprise development and deployment. The development tools will be familiar to anyone who's been tracking .NET best practices over the last four years, but the notes on the deployment environment, while inevitably specific to the author's particular deployment needs (for example, my boss-to-be, shaking his greying locks at my youthful zeal, has warned me that BizTalk deployment issues may well thwart my naive strategies for continuous integration and test), are well worth a look.

It will be interesting to see if deployment designers such as Whitehorse help to build a culture of common deployment best practices and supporting tools, similar to what we are already seeing in the development space (source code management, unit testing, automated build, etc.). Of course Whitehorse is only a static, physical architecture designer but what if we had a language for expressing deployment practices, like a content management system but for code instead of data?

Of course, they do say that code is data...