ASP.NET Web App Distribution

Question

What is the simplest way to distribute an asp.net web application? I tried to look at some of the open source asp.net projects out there to see how they distribute their apps and how they do updates and they seem rather complicated to me (not for myself to perform but for non-technical users). A lot of them entail backing up the entire installed project, deleting specific folders and save parts of their web.config. I am hoping to find a solution that will make the update process specifically as simple as possible.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Do you mean in terms of breaking up the functionality into tiers that could be handled on separate machines, e.g. having 3 servers for a 3-tier architecture where one is the DB server, one handles middleware and the other handles the requests in ASP.Net? Another point here would be in going from a web server to multiple web servers in terms of scaling up.

Or are you referring to deployment?

Answer 2

CommunityServer provides a setup msi that will create a virutal directory, generate the SQL database and populate it with default data. Updating for point releases though is still a manual process involving an update.sql file and having everyone download then merge binary and static file changes.

They probably could have created an update msi too, but because so many people customize CommunityServer, it is probably better to let people merge changes themselves.

Answer 3

I am working on a project with a similar requirement now. We decided to use WiX to create an installer that can be run on the server or machine where the site is installed. WiX is incredibly powerful, but takes a bit to get the hang of.

There are plenty of other open source, and paid installer technologies as well. Here is a post with some info on a few.

Answer 4

It's a web application, man. Serve it publicly, require registration, and move on. Isn't that the point of the web application?