Programming ASP.NET, 3rd Edition

Chapter 19. Deployment

Perhaps the single greatest improvement that .NET has made over previous generations of development environments, especially compared to classic ASP, is in the area of deployment, for the following reasons:

• 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.

• Web sites can be deployed with installer files (.msi) or using XCOPY.

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

• There are no versioning issues with conflicting dll files.

All of this will be described in this chapter. In the meantime, shout it from the rooftops: No more DLL hell!

ASP.NET derives all this deployment bliss by virtue of being part of the .NET Framework. These deployment features are common to all applications developed under the .NET Framework.

Understand that with all the different deployment scenarios, the fundamental requirement is that you are deploying the web application to a web server (or to servers in the case of a web farm,) which is running IIS, as described in the previous chapter. Even ...