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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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

A few months ago, we have a blog talking about extending the web publishing pipeline to package database project deployed SQL file.  In this blog, I’ll show step by step example of packaging web application with SQL Server database upgrade SQL file using Visual Studio 2010.  This way, we can...

When a zip package is built from VS2010 web application UI (via Build Deployment Package command), or through command line (msbuild myproject.csproj /t:package), a few files are generated in the destination folder. Here’s some brief description: File Name Description myApp.deploy-readme.txt Read me file...

If you crack open the project file in an ASP.Net MVC 2 application (in notepad or unload your project and then click “ Edit *.proj” ), you will notice an interesting line. <MvcBuildViews>false</MvcBuildViews> This is an option to enable a post build task that will run the Asp_net...

Visual Web Developer 2010 Express offers a great set of features for deploying web applications seamlessly. One of the key features is the ability to publish your web application from VS 2010 to a remote hosted web server along with its dependencies like SQL Server database using “Web One Click Publish...

Web Deployment (see this posting for an overview) offers a set of pre-determined options to allow users to include the most common sets of files for deployment. These options are as follows and can be found under the “Items to deploy” section on the Package / Publish Web property page. Only...

Publishing using MSDeploy In-Process Deployment or Remote Agent Through the Beta 2 release, VS 2010 had only supported publishing to servers using MSDeploy's IIS deployment handler technology integrated with the “Web Management Service”, a.k.a. WMSVC. As long as you had an account on a hosting server...

A Visual Studio solution file may contain both database project and a web application project.  When deploying (not building) the database project, it can generate a .sql file containing the full sql file or an incremental upgrade file against a database.  This blogs walkthrough one way to...

In Visual Studio 2010, the dependent assembly of a custom control assembly will be deleted from the project’s Bin folder on project clean or rebuild if the project does not contain a reference to that dependent assembly. The result will be a WAP that successfully builds but fails at runtime. When adding...

ORCS Web has updated their Hosting Sandbox for Visual Studio 2010 RC and ASP.NET 4.0 RC. http://vs2010host.com To learn more about the new Web Deployment features in Visual Studio 2010 check out this Step by Step Walkthrough on Web 1-Click Publish with VS 2010 To provide feedback on the RC please visit...

I’ll use a walkthrough example to show how to package a web application with speech API COM component using Visual Studio 2010.  I wrote and tested the sample in Win7 x86 with IIS7.5, and packaged and manually installed to win2k3 x86 IIS6 (which only had 3.5 framework installed). 1. Create a C#...

If we want to package and deploy .NET assemblies for a web application only, we can simply reference them and change their “Copy Local” property to “True”.  For example, we can do the following to package a MVC project from VS2010. Create a MVC project In its references, change the following three...

Discount ASP.Net has updated their Hosting Sandbox for Visual Studio 2010 RC and ASP.NET 4.0 RC. http://www.discountasp.net/press/2010_02_16_free-asp.net-4.0-RC-hosting.aspx To learn more about the new Web Deployment features in Visual Studio 2010 check out this Step by Step Walkthrough on Web 1-Click...

Web project package and deployment targets files are written with extensibility in mind.  User can easily extend a property to include more functionalities in their package by using msbuild targets and properties.  If we check the Microsoft.Web.Publishing.targets file under “%Program Files...