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In Visual Studio 2010 we introduced a simple and straight forward method of transforming web.config during publishing/packaging. This support is called XML Document Transform, aka XDT. It allows you to transform any XML file, not just web.config. To learn more about XDT check out the docs . Since we...

Hi everyone Sayed here. I recently had a customer, Johan, contact me to help with some challenges regarding deployment automation. He had some very specific requirements, but he was able to automate the entire process. He has been kind enough to agree to write up his experience to share with everyone...

Today I saw the following question on StackOverflow MSDeploy - Deploying Contents of a Folder to a Remote IIS Server and decided to write this post to answer the question. Web Deploy (aka MSDeploy) uses a provider model and there are a good number of providers available out of the box. To give you an...

One of the most requested features of Visual Studio 2012 was the ability to open projects in both VS 2012 as well as VS 2010 ( requires VS 2010 SP1 ). In case you haven’t heard we did implement that feature. You may be wondering how we were able to do this and how this may impact you. If you open the...

When we released VS2010 we add support for web.config (XDT) transforms during publish/package. Note: From now on I’ll only use the word publish from now on but the full content relates to packaging as well. In the original implementation when you published your web project the web.config file would be...

Within the web publishing tools in Visual Studio there are a few places where we point to more resources. For example if you open a VS publish profile (.pubxml) file you will see a link in the comments pointing to http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=208121 . Note: you can find the VS publish profiles...

When building Visual Studio 2012 we made an effort to reduce the amount of menu options which are shown on toolbars as well as context menus. If you have used any of the pre-release versions of VS 2012 then you might have noticed that the Build Deployment Package and Package/Publish Settings context...

The release of Visual Studio 2012 is right around the corner . If you’ve been following our blog/twitter then you may know that many of the Web related components of Visual Studio are now“out-of-band”, meaning that we can update them independently of Visual Studio itself. Because of this we are planning...

If you have been following our blog and twitter accounts then you most likely have heard that some of the Web components of Visual Studio 2012 are now “Out of Band”. What that means is that we can update those components separately from Visual Studio itself. Because of this we will be posting updates...

Last week we rolled out some updates for our Visual Studio 2010 Web Publishing Experience. This post will give you an overview of the new features which we released. In the coming weeks there will be more posts getting into more details regarding individual features. You can get these updates in the...

We have two sets of ASP.NET providers which currently exist; the ASP.NET SQL providers , and the ASP.NET Universal Providers . In VS 2010 the SQL providers were in only providers used for our project templates. In VS 2012 we have switched to using the Universal Providers. One of the drawbacks of the...

In Visual Studio 2010 we introduced a database publishing experience in the Package/Publish SQL (PP/SQL) properties page. This support relies on generating create scripts from the source database and then executing those scripts when you publish your web application. For more details regarding this feature...

If you have tried out our new Web Publish experience in Visual Studio you may have noticed that the Update Database checkbox is disabled. See the image below. The intended behavior of this checkbox is to enable you to incrementally publish your database schema from the source (the connection string in...

Today I saw a post on stackoverflow.com asking Using Microsoft AJAX Minifier with Visual Studio 2010 1-click publish . This is a response to that question. The Web Publishing Pipeline is pretty extensive so it is easy for us to hook in to it in order to perform operation such as these. One of those extension...

Back in November I participated in Virtual Tech Days which is an online conference presented by Microsoft. In the session I discussed the enhancements to web deployment using Visual Studio 2010 and MSDeploy. Some of the topics which I covered includ: web.conig (XDT) transforms How to publish to local...

A few days ago Jason Zander blogged about the availability of Visual Studio SP1 Beta (all links below in resources section). I am happy to let you guys know that with SP1 Beta we have enabled integration of IIS Express into Visual Studio. After you have installed SP1 Beta you have to download IIS Express...

One of the really cool features that we shipped for Visual Studio 2010 was web.config (XDT) transformations . Because the transformations are so simple and straightforward one of the first questions that someone asks after using it is “how can I use this in my other projects?” Unfortunately this feature...

Today I just saw a question posted on stackoverflow.com asking Why are some Web.config transforms tokenised into SetParameters.xml and others are not ? Let me give some background on this topic for those who are not aware of what the question is. With Visual Studio 2010 when you package your application...

I just saw a post on Twitter asking the question Is there any easy way to see the underlying MSBuild command when building in VS2010? Want to see the MSDeploy params. @ wdeploy ? One thing to know is that when you publish from Visual Studio, by default we use the MSDeploy (AKA Web Deployment Tool...

DIsclaimer: You may experience some in-consistent behavior using this technique. If so please let us know. I have heard a lot of questions and confusion regarding web.debug.config and web.release.config. For example here is just one question on StackOverflow . The question states: Hello, I want...