Visual Studio - A faster way to publish?

Question

I have an ASP.NET application in VS2008 that is growing larger and am developing and testing on IIS7, not Cassini/IIS dev, so when I make changes, I publish, run and test.

The publish is taking longer and longer, since there are more and more builds for different projects within the solution. If I want to make simple changes to say an aspx file, instead of publishing, I just modify the published version to avoid the cost of the publish which is a pain.

Is there a better/faster way? Is there something out there that talks about best practices/efficient publish/run/test techniques for VS2008?

Answer 1

Personally, I just created a virtual site in my IIS running on port 1337 (Ye, I'm a geek, but I find that funny :P ), which points to the root of my project. I keep a browser open on localhost:1337, press F6 in VS and then F5 in my browser - no need to publish :)

Works like a charm :)

Answer 2

simply try to separate data, auto generated files and business layers in different projects, so you won't need to build the all solution, just parts of that. Also make a clone locally, make changes and publish online using repository tools, like GIT or SVN.