Beginning ASP.NET 3.5: In C# and VB

18.2. Copying Your Web Site

During development of your site you use the built-in web server that ships with Visual Web Developer. While this server is great for local development, you can't use it in a production environment, as it only listens to requests coming from localhost. To put your site in production, you need to deploy it to a machine that runs IIS — Internet Information Services, Microsoft's professional web server. In this section you see how to prepare your site so it can be run under IIS. Later in this chapter you see how to install and configure IIS.

To deploy your site to a production server, the deployment targets shown in the following table are available, right from within VWD.

Deployment Option	Description
File system	This option allows you to create a copy of the site on the local file system of your development machine or networked machine. This option is useful if you want to move the files manually to your production server later.
Local IIS	This option allows you to create a copy of your site that will run under your local IIS installation.
FTP	This option allows you to send the files that make up your web application to a remote server directly using FTP.
Remote Server	This option allows you to send the files that make up your web application to a remote IIS server. For this option to work, the remote server needs to have the Front Page Server Extensions installed. Check out the documentation that comes with IIS or consult the administrator of your remote server ...