We have a Windows service which I'd like to run from a lot of machines. Right now we login and install the service manually on each machine when we need to update the services. This is a very time consuming process. Is there a tool which makes this easy to do?
Also, sometimes when we install upgrades we need to change the config files. Are there any tools that also support changing config files easily as part of the workflow? We were looking at RedGate's Deployment Manager but it only supports editing "appSettings" and "connectionStrings" elements and not other stuff in the config files.
First you want to make a clean, well behaving MSI. Windows Installer XML and IsWiX has a great story for that.
Once you have an MSI, you want to install it silently on your 15 machines. There are many tools for this. SCCM is a huge investment and a lot of infrastructure. You might be able to just sling a .BAT file to do it.
robocopy /mir C:\package \machine1\c$\package robocopy /mir C:\package \machine2\c$\package ...
psexec remote command on machine msiexec /I foo.msi /qn REBOOT=R /l*v c:\package\install.log