Is there a better way to deploy web applications using Visual Studio 2010?

Question

I am using Visual Studio 2010 and IIS 7.0 .Currently when I want to deploy an website to my web server I follow these steps -

1.Right-click on website and say publish..to get the entire site copied to a local folder.

2.Next using filezilla just ftp the copied files to the web server.

The problem is I have to deploy entire website all the time since I can't keep a track of the changes. Although I do find my way easier and without problems. I dont want to a whole lot of configuration and deployment packages unless it is really worth it and also relatively easy to do. Is there a better way I should do the deployment ? Any suggestions are welcome !

Answer 1

You can just right click on website and Publish Web Site; the Publish Website Wizard opens. You can click the ... button to browse on the Target Location textbox and choose FTP over in the left hand side, then put in your FTP credentials.

You can tick 'Allow this precompiled site to be updateable' so if you need to make minor changes (such as scripts, css, or html) but I don't know how reliable that is.

Good luck!

Answer 2

If you are using the Publish Wizard then you have no choice but to deploy the whole site. There is no way for the wizard to look at the files on the server and know definitively if the file has changed or not (it could look at file size or something, but that's not 100% guarantee of no change and FTP doesn't offer an easy way to do a checksum algorithm).

Other then that, do it the way you would do it on any other language/tool. Just manually FTP the files you've changed. Of course, this means you have know which files are side-affected by your changes. And if you're not confident as to what files you've side affected.... publish wizard is your friend :)

Answer 3

You could use the Web Deployment tool. It needs to be installed on the webserver too and can even take care of publishing a sql server database.

http://www.iis.net/download/WebDeploy

Do NOT use the Web Platform installer to install this package.

Answer 4

Scott Gu just published an article about the Deploy Features in VS today: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/07/29/vs-2010-web-deployment.aspx

Personally I use Dispatch for ASP.NET. Works well for me. It only uploads the files that have changed and can check for files that are missing locally or on the server. http://dispatchasp.net/