[.NET 2.0] Using Web Deployment Projects with Visual Studio 2005

Visual Studio 2005 provides deployment support though its Copy Web Site and Publish Web Site features. While these are ideal for many scenarios, there are other, more advanced scenarios where developers need the following capabilities:

• More control over assembly naming and output.
• Custom pre-processing and post-processing for the build.
• The ability to exclude, add, and transform files and directories during builds.
• The ability to modify the Web.config file to change database connection strings, application settings, or the URLs for Web references, depending on the build configuration. (For example, it might be necessary to use different values for development, test, staging, and release settings).

This white paper describes a solution to these advanced scenarios and introduces a new feature called Web Deployment Projects for Visual Studio 2005.

There is a VS.NET plugin available on that page with the following features for building ASP.NET 2.0 web sites:

• ASP.NET 2.0 precompilation as part of the build process.
• More flexible options for generating compiled assemblies from a Web project, including these alternatives:
  • A single assembly for the entire Web site.
  • One assembly per content folder.
  • A single assembly for all UI components.
  • An assembly for each compiled file in the Web site.
• Assembly signing options.
• The ability to define custom pre-build and post-build actions.
• The ability to exclude folders from the build.
• The ability to modify settings in the Web.config file, such as the <connectionString> element, based on the Visual Studio build configuration.
• Support for creating .msi files with setup projects.

The extensibility of Web Deployment projects enables you to tailor the build and deploy process to suit your needs. This is done without sacrificing the optimized workflow improvements achieved with Visual Studio 2005 Web site projects.