New Web Deployment Features with Visual Studio 2010 and IIS
If you have ever deployed a web application, you realize the process isn’t exactly a pain free operation. There are often several steps and people involved (especially in enterprise scenarios) and as such many areas were things can go wrong. In an attempt to make the process less error prone, many people/organizations try to introduce a heavy process around the developer-to-server admin hand off. With Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft is hoping to ease the pain somewhat. There was a great announcement recently on the Visual Studio Web Developer Team Blog which attempts to showcase some of the new Visual Studio 2010 deployment features.
In short, here is what Microsoft is planning for the new web deployment features in VS2010:
- Web Packaging – Use of a new deployment tool, MSDeploy, to create a .ZIP file that can be used to package your web application (IIS settings, content, SQL Server database, etc.)
- Web.Config Transformation – Ability via MSBuild to transform your development web.config into your production web.config.
- Database Deployment – Ability to script database data/scheme and package it for deployment – including the ability to sequence SQL script execution.
- 1-Click Publish – Publish your web application and dependencies to IIS with 1-click.
There is no doubt that these features will not solve every problem for every scenario of web application deployment. But, I think the feature set does look promising and has potential to help out in many situations. It’ll be an area to keep an eye on as Visual Studio 2010 gets closer to release.
Read more about the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 web deployment features at https://blogs.msdn.com/webdevtools/archive/2009/02/04/web-deployment-with-vs-2010-and-iis.aspx.
