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...

For many web applications developed using Visual Studio, developers uses SQL express with mdf database file under app_data folder.  If deploying data host requires SQL server, developers have to find ways to deploy the schema and data from mdf file to the host SQL server. Dev10 Beta1 provides an...

  Here is an example of end to end scenario of the last blog VS2010 Beta1 Web Application Project Database package and SMO options . Here, we’re going to package a web application and its database with “Delete existing objects before creating” flag, so that we can test the deploy multiple times...

In Visual Studio 2010 Beta1 release, SQL server database schema and data can be packaged for deployment along with the website.  It utilizes Msdeploy SQL Database provider functionality in IIS team’s msdeploy release.  In Visual studio 2010 Beta1, user can set the database package options in...

In this blog post I will explain how to get and install the Microsoft Web Deployment Tool, so you can share created packages with others and how to setup a Windows 2008 Server to allow packages to be deployed from Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1. Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 ships with and installs Microsoft...

With VS10 beta1 environment, you can also install Silverlight 3 beta to combine the power of both. When a Silverlight 3 beta project is compiled, it generates xap file.  The web application or website should take the xap as content for Build Action.  The following shows what the default Siliverlight...

Today we are announcing the availability of FREE HOSTING accounts for web developers to try out the new feature sets of Visual Studio 2010 Beta1, ASP.NET 4 Beta1 and Microsoft Web Deployment Tool (MsDeploy) RC1… VS 2010 has great set of features on deploying web applications seamlessly…   One...

The public release of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 is now available and can be downloaded here . This is one of the most compelling updates to Visual Studio we’ve seen in years.  The entire IDE has been refreshed with a new look and all the code editors including the HTML and ASPX editors have replaced...

We have earlier discussed about Web Deployment and Web Packaging quite a bit, today I wanted to dive into web.config transformation. If you would like to check out the other topics please read through the earlier blog posts below: Web Deployment with VS 2010 and IIS Web Packaging: Creating a Web Package...