Deploying ASP.NET 4 Applications with Visual Studio (part 2) - Copying a Website and Publishing a Website

2. Copying a Website

Visual Studio also includes a quick and easy way to transfer your web application files without using a separate program or leaving the design environment. You simply need to open your web project and select Website => Copy Web Site from the menu. This opens a new Visual Studio dialog box that will be familiar to anyone who has used an HTML design program like Microsoft FrontPage or Expression Web (see Figure 4).

Figure 4. Copying a website

This window includes two file lists. On the left are the files in the current project (on your local hard drive). On the right are the files on the target location (the remote web server). When you first open this window, you won't see anything on the right, because you haven't specified the target. You need to click the Connect button at the top of the window to supply this information.

When you click Connect, Visual Studio shows a familiar dialog box—it looks almost the same as what you see when you create a virtual directory for a new project. Using this window, you can specify one of the following types of locations:

File System:

This is the easiest choice—you simply need to browse through a tree of drives and directories or through the shares provided by other computers on the network. If you want to create a new directory for your application, just click the Create New Folder icon above the top-right corner of the directory tree.

Local IIS:

This choice allows you to browse the virtual directories made available on the local computer through IIS. To create a new virtual directory for your web application, click the Create New Web Application icon or the Create New Virtual Directory icon at the top-right corner of the virtual directory tree, as you learned earlier.

FTP Site:

This option isn't quite as convenient as browsing for a directory—instead, you'll need to enter all the connection information, including the FTP site, port, directory, and a user name and password before you can connect (see Figure 5).

Figure 5. Setting the target site

Remote Web Server:

This option accesses a website at a specified URL using HTTP. For this to work, the web server must have the FrontPage Extensions installed. When you connect, you'll be prompted for a user name and password.

Once you choose the appropriate destination, click Open. Visual Studio will attempt to connect to the remote site and retrieve a list of its files.

The Copy Web Site feature is particularly useful for updating a web server. That's because Visual Studio compares the file list on the local and remote websites, and it flags files that exist in one location only (with the status New) or those that are newer versions (with the status Changed). You can then select the files you want to transfer and click one of the arrow buttons to transfer them from one location to the other (see Figure 6).

Figure 6. Synchronizing a remote website

3. Publishing a Website

The website copying feature is great for transferring files to a test server. However, it doesn't give you the option of precompiling your code. If you're deploying your application to a live web server and you want to keep the source code tightly locked down, you'll want something more.

As described earlier in this chapter, you can use the aspnet_compiler command-line utility to compile ASP.NET applications. This functionality is also available in Visual Studio through the website publishing feature. While the website copying feature is designed to let you update individual files (which is ideal when updating a test server), the publishing feature is intended to transfer your entire website in compiled form with a couple of clicks.

Here's what you need to do: