In Visual Studio 2013 we have added a couple of small features for web publishing that I’d like to share with you. Those updates are; how to take your app offline during publishing and how you can update the default file compare option. App offline support In Visual Studio when you publish your web application we do not force the remote app to be...

The other day I received an email from a customer with a question which I’ve summarized as below. I have a solution containing multiple web projects. One of the projects, _RootSite, is the top level website which I want to publish. It’s an MVC project. I also have other web projects in the same solution. These other projects are apps themselves...

I’ve written a few blog posts on how to exclude files from publishing/packaging. In each of these posts you’d have to be familiar with MSBuild and the Web Publish process. I’ve been looking for a much simpler way to exclude files/folder from publishing. When using git you can easily exclude files and folders using a .gitignore file. Inside the .gi...

Today we released an update to the Visual Studio **2013 Preview **which enables you to create ASP.NET applications which use Windows Azure Active Directory for authentication. In this post I will describe; how you can get the additional support, where to find more info and a list of known issues. How to get the latest support In order to try out...

In Visual Studio 2010 we introduced a simple and straight forward method of transforming web.config during publishing/packaging. This support is called XML Document Transform, aka XDT. It allows you to transform any XML file, not just web.config. To learn more about XDT check out the docs. Since we've released XDT there has been interest in re-usi...

We have just released the XDT transform engine on NuGet, with a license which allows you to redistribute the assembly with your own product. . If you are not familiar with XDT it is a XML transformation engine which drives our web.config transforms in Visual Studio. You can read more about XDT at here. You can now take a dependency on XDT and ship ...

Hi everyone Sayed here. I recently had a customer, Johan, contact me to help with some challenges regarding deployment automation. He had some very specific requirements, but he was able to automate the entire process. He has been kind enough to agree to write up his experience to share with everyone. His story is below. If you have any comments pl...

Today I saw the following question on StackOverflow MSDeploy - Deploying Contents of a Folder to a Remote IIS Server and decided to write this post to answer the question. Web Deploy (aka MSDeploy) uses a provider model and there are a good number of providers available out of the box. To give you an example of some of the providers; when syncing ...

One of the most requested features of Visual Studio 2012 was the ability to open projects in both VS 2012 as well as VS 2010 (requires VS 2010 SP1). In case you haven’t heard we did implement that feature. You may be wondering how we were able to do this and how this may impact you. If you open the .csproj/.vbproj for a Web Project created in VS20...

Within the web publishing tools in Visual Studio there are a few places where we point to more resources. For example if you open a VS publish profile (.pubxml) file you will see a link in the comments pointing to http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=208121. Note: you can find the VS publish profiles in your web project under Properties\Publi...