Mark Rosenberg, 5 Time MVP. MCP, MCTS, MCPD, MCT, STEP
Last time I talked about Intellitrace in Visual Studio 2010. This time I am going to talk about MSDeploy. MSDeploy is a tool that will help you deploy web sites. It was originally included in IIS7 and used to help deploy a website over a server farm. The idea is you could copy the files and settings from an existing working web site from one web server, zip all that info up, take it to another server, and with one click (or a few clicks) install all the files and settings on the other server, including things like application pools and security settings from IIS.
Visual Studio 2010 has a front end to this tool and actually adds some functionality to it. You get to the Package/Publish Web Site tabs by right clicking on your web project and either selecting Properties or Package/Publish. You can choose to package all files in the project, or only the ones you need to run the web site. You can also include or exclude the files in the App_Data folder. There is a second tab called Deploy SQL which handles deploying a database. You can package (and the tool will create the scripts) to include an entire database and all its data or just the database schema, or you can create your own scripts to run against the database to update an existing schema.
Another feature in Visual Studio 2010 that is included in MSDeploy is multiple web.config files. You get one web.config file for each configuration you have defined. By default you get debug and release, but of course you can add additional configurations. You can have entirely different config files, or you can use a simple langage to change parts of the file.
Finally, just like in IIS, using MSDeploy from Visual studio 2010 can retrieve things like application pools from IIS and package them with your web site. All this information is put in a .zip file which you can then give to your IT staff to install in QA or Production.
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