ASP.NET 4 Deployment MSBUILD

Question

I'm using VS2010 with the Web Deployment Projects to create a release package for my web application. In WDP I have created some build tasks to for example transform the web.config, create some directories and remove some files.

Now I've migrated the web application to ASP.NET 4 and I've been looking at this feature in VS2010 called Package/Publish. Is it possible to use this feature and add custom MSBUILD tasks, like with WDP?

I would like to get rid of the WDP plugin if the same is possible with a default VS2010 setup.

Answer 1

Hi the package/publish features are a part of a process known as the Web Publishing Pipeline, which is captured inside of MSBuild targets & tasks. For Visual Studio 2010 Web Application Projects (WAP) the file Microsoft.WebApplication.targets & Microsoft.Web.Publishing.targets (under %Program Files(x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\WebApplications) are imported into the project file. If you want to customize the package/publish process you should be able to.

Here are some links to get you started. If you have specific questions post them and I can take a look.

• http://sedodream.com/2010/05/01/WebDeploymentToolMSDeployBuildPackageIncludingExtraFilesOrExcludingSpecificFiles.aspx
• http://sedodream.com/2010/03/10/WebDeploymentToolIncludingOtherFiles.aspx
• http://sedodream.com/2010/03/11/WebDeploymentToolMSDeployCustomProviderTake1.aspx
• http://sedodream.com/2010/05/01/WebDeploymentToolMSDeployBuildPackageIncludingExtraFilesOrExcludingSpecificFiles.asp
• http://www.vishaljoshi.blogspot.com/
• http://blogs.iis.net/msdeploy/default.aspx
• http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdevtools