ASP.NET 3.5 Website Programming: Problem-Design-Solution

Chapter 13. Deploying the Site

You've come to the end of the development: your site is ready, you've tested it locally and it all works fine, and now you have to publish it online. If you've ever had any experience with older legacy ASP/COM applications, and later with ASP.NET 1.x applications, you already know that .NET made deployment much easier: you no longer had any COM components to register, or shared components that might overwrite an existing version and thus break other applications. For pure ASP.NET applications, it may suffice to do an XCOPY of all your deployment-related files (such as .aspx, .dll, .config, and image files) to the remote server, and then deploy the database. However, in the real world, things usually tend to get a little more complex than that because you have constraints and company policies to respect regarding the deployment of your application. Database deployment and configuration are also nontrivial, and you should consider this carefully before you start rolling out the site. In this final chapter, I will guide you through all of the different options to successfully deploy your website's files and the database, explaining why and when some techniques are more suitable than another.

Problem

The problem described and solved here was a real problem that I faced while completing the sample site. I wanted to put the site online somewhere so that potential readers could browse it and consider whether it was worth the purchase, and so that I could show ...