How to Deploy Visual Web Developer Express to GoDaddy

Question

I have finished the programming on my first web site using Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2010 Express. I have copied all of the files to the GoDaddy server, but the site still displays "Coming Soon". I spoke with their tech support who tell me that there is no "index" file. I used the "Copy Web Site" function in VWD to move all the files over via FTP, so I know of no other files that should be copied. Nor do I understand what they are referring to as in "index" file.

Has anybody else had this problem? Can anybody help me to figure out why this isn't working?

Thanks! Randy

Answer 1

By default GoDaddy displays Welcome.html, you should check if this file still exists and delete it.

Answer 2

The index file is the default file that should be displayed when someone visits http://yoururl.com. Here's the list of index filenames that GoDaddy recognizes. You should make sure the name of the page you want displayed by default is on this list.

Answer 3

OK, I figured this out and am posting in case any other newbies (or anyone else) has the same problem. There were actually a couple of reasons that this was failing:

1. When I created the "home" page in Visual Web Developer, I just added a new web form and named it Home.aspx. Being a rookie, I didn't realize that the page called "default.aspx" was required to be where I put the code for the initial page. At some point, not seeing a purpose for default.aspx, I deleted it. Now I know that default.aspx is mandatory.

2. I was working in Visual Web Developer Express 2010, which is an ASP.net 4.0 beta (as of April 2010). GoDaddy only supports up to .net version 3.5 (also as of April 2010), and even then they don't really encourage anything beyond 2.0 (according to a tech support person). So I had to uninstall 2010 and install 2008 (a 3.5 platform).

Once I completed these two steps, and published the site to the ftp server, everything worked as intended.

I hope that this is helpful to anybody encountering the same issue(s).