Beginning ASP.NET 3.5: In C# and VB

18.4. Moving Data to a Remote Server

Releasing a site to IIS on your local machine is pretty straightforward. You simply copy the data to a new location, configure IIS, change a few security settings and that's it. Because the site continues to use SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, it will run fine.

If you need to move your site to an external server or host, things are not so easy. Although copying the files that make up your site is usually extremely simple using an FTP program, copying data from your SQL Server 2005 database to your host is quite often a bit trickier. This is because most web hosts don't support SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, so you can't just simply copy the .mdf files to the App_Data folder at your remote host. Instead, these hosts often offer the full versions of SQL Server, which you can access either with a web-based management tool or with tools like SQL Server Management Studio (for SQL Server 2005) and Enterprise Manager (for SQL Server 2000).

To make it easy to transfer data from your local SQL Server 2005 database into a SQL Server database of your web host, Microsoft has created the Database Publishing Wizard.

18.4.1. Using the Database Publishing Wizard

The Database Publishing Wizard allows you to create a .SQL script that contains all the information required to recreate your database and its data at a remote server. Recreating this data is a two-step process:

1. Create a .SQL script from your local SQL Server database.

2. Send this script to your hosts ...