Today I ran two rounds of deployment of to our production servers. This led me to start pondering a blog post on the strategy we've chosen to make this as painless as possible.

Our operational requirements demands that deployment of new versions is done continuously, without downtime, while our users are actively using the software.
As long as the deployment environment is controlled, .net applications can be xcopied directly, with no extra steps. But our application is a mix of .net and legacy VB6 components. This mix would lead many to believe that registration in the registry is unavoidable, which could lead to DLL hell.

But there is a solution: