I'd like to get the pulse of the community on whether to precompile or not. I know its cold start time is faster, and it hides code. However, there is something dirty about it, IMO. Maybe its the name, compiling a website sounds incorrect.
In general how are you deploying web apps?
We use the precompiled approach on my team because we have to hand off the deployment to the infrastructure team. We build an MSI package (with a web deployment project) that installs the new release to the website.
It's more of a separation of duties/responsibilities thing that drives our methodology though, nothing technical.
I use precompiled, updateable web sites exclusively for ASP.NET web forms.
We do not deploy our websites precompiled.
Reason: "that's how we did it the first time and it hasn't broken yet."
i only precompile websites that are sold and licensed commercially, in order to protect the source code from modification.
supposedly this benefits performance, but that is secondary; it's nearly impossible to rationally support a commercial web site product if anyone can muck with the code!
Having the source code laying around on Production servers is generally a bad plan. Taking the pre-compiled approach feels a bit safer :)
Our pre-compiled web site gets built into an MSI package that is used for deployment to a clustered environment.
Okay I have two answers depending on the situation:
Situation 1: I am deploying and I will continue to deploy upgrages. I use the copy method. It's simpler for me, I know what I'm doing and that way I don't have to write an installer.
Situation 2: An unknown party [ie. the client] with unknown skill is going to be attempting to deploy my site, I write an installer and documentation an 8 year old can follow on going through the installer right through to configuration - and if necessary data input. So in this situation the precompiled method is far easier.
So I don't use either religiously, I pick the most appropriate method for the situation.
In our case precompiling found us some pages that did not compile.
So I'd reccommend doing a precompile during the build, but not necessarily deploing it.