Professional Visual Studio® 2008

50.1. Web Application Deployment

There are a variety of ways to deploy web applications that range from building an installer capable of creating the necessary virtual directory to using FTP to copy the web site to a remote server. In this section you see a number of the options you can use from within Visual Studio 2008.

50.1.1. Publish Web Site

One of the simplest ways to deploy a web site from Visual Studio 2008 is to publish it via the Publish item on the Build menu. Exactly what options are displayed when you go to publish your web site will depend on whether you are using the ASP.NET Web Application or the ASP.NET Web Site project template. Figure 50-1 displays the two different dialogs that are presented: on the left are the options for publishing a web site and on the right are the options for publishing a web application. As you can see, some of the options that are presented for the web site are not relevant to a web application, or they are contained in the project settings that can be accessed via the Web tab of the project properties editor.

Figure 50.1. Figure 50-1

Irrespective of whether you are publishing a web site or a web application, you need to define the target location, which can be a local instance of IIS, an FTP site, elsewhere on the file system, or a remote instance of IIS. Clicking the ellipses button next to the Target Location textbox in Figure ...