What's this with the Microsoft Web Plaform

Question

Sorry. I'm just bitten (or bit. Go figure with this left-to-right language :-)

I've invested a huge amount of effort studying NANT and learning how to build a command line CI environment. My goal was to solve the build issue once and for all so I'll be able to develop a few projects (web sites) and have them deployed "at the press of a button". So cool...

Then, trying to see the difference between Web Sites and Web Application (been there, done that, can never remember the difference) I stumble today upon Microsoft's Web Deployment tool MSDeploy, and now the Microsoft Web Platform.

So my question - Is this something completely new changing the rules of the development/deployment game, or is this just Microsotian Marketing Wrapper for ASP.Net etc. and I should stick with nAnt process and just integrate a different final step?

Answer 1

No. MSDEPLOY is a very rich deployment technology they've been working on for some time. It's available in VS2010 beta 1, I believe. I allows the deployment of the web application, including any databases it uses. It permits different versions of web.config to be used in a Debug deployment vs. a Release deployment, and much more.

The Microsoft Web Platform Installer is simply a packaging of a bunch of their server technologies. The idea was to have a single installer that installs everything.

I had not seen that Microsoft Web Platform site before. It looks like a packaging of the marketing around this stuff!