ASP .NET Deployment Model for a Live Site

Question

I have recently inherited a brownfield application that is currently live. Through response, or a response with a link, how and what is the best method to make changes to a site and deploy them to a live ASP .NET website.

Answer 1

Duplicate Question:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/62816/what-could-be-good-ways-to-deploy-aspnet-web-applications

Answer 2

I always develop on my box first.

I'll test, make a backup of the live site, and then ftp the updates over.

Simple, but I haven't had an issue yet.

Also: I have svn running, too, and I do commit changes before updating the live site. That way I have two backups: source control and physical, zipped backups.

Answer 3

Don't know if this will work for you, but we use the "Use fixed naming and single page assemblies" publish model of VS2005. We test locally, deploy to a dev server to test with the other developer's changes (there are only 2 of us), and then deploy to a temp directory on the live server. Then we RDP into the live server, backup the files we changed, and copy the new ones over in place.

Works really well, and we avoid paving each other's stuff this way. We tried deploying direct to the site using the built in deploy, but that removes the entire directories, deleting a whole bunch of static files we have within the IIS root folders.

Answer 4

The most manageable approach I've found is with a deployment application. Application Center 2000 was pretty good, but that's no longer supported. The new application is available at http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1602 . It works on COM assemblies as well.