Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0

Chapter 13. Deployment

The process of developing software consists of some predefined stages that are documented and taught to many developers. Based on the scale of the software and investments, some of these stages may be ignored and some may be restricted. However, you should be at least generally knowledgeable about some stages, such as planning, estimation, development, testing, deployment, and maintenance.

This chapter focuses mainly on one of these steps, deployment, for ASP.NET MVC applications. Here, you discover different ways to deploy an ASP.NET MVC application, and decide which one is the best option for your applications.

As Web applications, ASP.NET MVC projects are usually harder to install than Windows desktop applications, but in the past few years, there has been a significant improvement in the way that you can deploy Web applications.

Thankfully, ASP.NET MVC offers better deployment options than ASP.NET WebForms and also makes it easier and more flexible to deploy applications on servers and hosts. Moreover, Microsoft has been working on new tools such as the Web Platform Installer, which makes it pretty easy to configure a Web server and deploy a Web application to it.

Obviously, this chapter doesn't have any code to offer, but it gives you a good guide to deploying your ASP.NET MVC application based on the situation and your requirements. The following are the main topics covered in this chapter:

• A quick overview of deployment

• ASP.NET MVC hosting options

• Prerequisites ...