Programming ASP.NET 3.5, 4th Edition

Chapter 20. Deployment

Perhaps one of the most useful features in Visual Studio that goes mostly unheralded is the ease with which you can deploy ASP.NET websites. Indeed, with two types of Visual Studio projects for a website—a Web Site Project and a Web Application Project—there are now even more options than before with respect to deployment. ASP.NET derives all of this deployment bliss by virtue of being part of the .NET Framework and being implemented on Visual Studio. This means that:

• If you use Web Site Projects, source code files need only be located in a specific directory (App_Code) to be automatically compiled and available.

• Precompiled .dll files only have to be located in a specific directory (bin) to be visible to an application.

• You don’t need to register objects, either in the Registry or elsewhere, for an application to use the contents of a .dll. Installation does not require any registering of components with regsrvr32 or any other utility, though globally available components may be placed in the Global Assembly Cache.

• Websites can be deployed with installer files (.msi) or by using XCOPY or a Web Deployment Project. You can also use Visual Studio 2008 (VS2008) to deploy your website with a single click of the Publish button.

• Websites can be updated without stopping the web server or the application.

• There are no versioning issues with conflicting .dll files.

• Web Application Projects can be integrated into automated builds and given pre- and post-compilation tasks. ...