Professional ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 Edition: In C# and VB

Chapter 37. Packaging and Deploying ASP.NET Applications

Packaging and deploying ASP.NET applications are topics that usually receive little attention. This chapter is going to take a more in-depth look at how you can package and deploy your ASP.NET applications after they are built. After you have developed your ASP.NET application on a development computer, you will need to deploy the finished product to a quality assurance or staging server, and eventually on a production server.

An important reason to consider the proper packaging and deploying of your ASP.NET applications is that many applications are built as saleable products, starter kits, or solutions. In this case you may have to allow complete strangers to download and install these products in their own environments that you have absolutely no control over. If this is the case, it is ideal to give the consumer a single installer file that ensures proper installation of the application in any environment.

But regardless of whether you will distribute your web application outside your company you still need a way to deploy it to another server where it can be tested before production deployment. You should never assume that it will be perfect just because it worked on your computer. Most of the time we just develop using the internal web server in Visual Studio, so we will need a full test using IIS before we assume all is well. Even if you do test with IIS on your computer there are still deployment related factorsthat ...