Is there any kind of idiots guide to deploying your ASP.NET MVC website in one click?

Question

Hello. I'm about to begin building a website using the ASP.NET MVC framework and I'm trying to find a good solution to 1)Source Control Management and 2)Deployment. For the SCM, I'm probably going to use SourceGear since it integrates into Visual Studio nicely, but for deployment, I don't even know where to start. Up until know, most websites that I've built were very static and every time I had to update the site, I would use an FTP program and just drag and drop the files to the server. But now that I'm going to be building a much more dynamic web application, this approach feels dangerous (which, oddly enough, is also my middle name).

Does there exist some kind of idiots guide or tutorial that explains a good way to deploy an update to your website?

Thanks so much in advance for all your help!

Answer 1

Source Control

For source control, I like to use SubVersion at home. I would recommend using VisualSVN Server to install the server - it's free and ridiculously easy to use.

On the client side of things, I use TortoiseSVN (for shell integration) and VisualSVN (for Visual Studio integration). The small ammount of money for VisualSVN is well worth it, but there is a free open source equivilent AnkhSVN.

That's just what I use and there are many alternatives out there.

Deployment

I would definitely recommend using Microsoft Web Deploy.

Scott Gu just blogged today about it - Automating Deploy with Microsoft Web Deploy. There there is also Scott Hanselman's guide - Web Deployment Made Awesome: If You're Using XCopy, You're Doing It Wrong.

I recently came across a couple of posts by Jon Torresdal using Team Foundation Server (SCM), TeamCity (CI), and Web Deploy to implement a 'no-click' web deployment. They make for very interesting reading but they're definitely not what you'd consider idiots guide material.

• No-Click Web Deployment – Part 1
• No-Click Web Deployment – Part 2 – Web Deploy (a.k.a. msdeploy)

HTHs,
Charles