ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Website Programming: Problem – Design – Solution

Chapter 12. Deploying the Site

You've finally come to the end of the development: your site is ready, you have tested it locally and it all works fine, and now you have to publish it online. If you have ever had any experience with older legacy ASP/COM applications, and later with ASP.NET Web Form 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, .ascx, .dll, .config, and static files) to the remote server, and possibly deploy the database. With the release of the MVC framework and ASP.NET 3.5, the ease of deployment has not changed. 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 can also be nontrivial, and you should consider this carefully before you start rolling out the site. This final chapter guides 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 others.

Problem

The problem described and solved here was a real problem that we faced while completing the sample site. We wanted to put the site online somewhere ...