ASP.NET in a Nutshell

Deploying Through Visual Studio .NET

If you are using Visual Studio .NET to create your web applications, you have some additional deployment options at your disposal. These options include simply using Visual Studio’s Copy Project command to copy some or all project files to a new location and using a Web Setup project to create a Windows Installer package to install the web application, including creating the necessary IIS directories. These techniques are discussed in the following sections.

In addition to these options, Visual Studio .NET allows you to open a project directly from the Web, so you could theoretically create the project directly on the target server and edit it there. This is only recommended for development systems, since incorrect edits made using this technique on production systems could result in application errors or downtime. To open a project from the Web, simply open Visual Studio .NET and select File → Open → Project From Web....

Deploying Using Copy Project

The simplest option for deploying a project from Visual Studio is to use the Copy Project command. You can access Copy Project by either selecting Copy Project... from the Project menu or clicking the Copy Project button in the Solution Explorer toolbar, as shown in Figure 11-1.

Figure 11-1. Copy Project button in Solution Explorer

Either method will open the Copy Project dialog, shown in Figure 11-2 ...