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...
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 I saw a post on stackoverflow.com asking Using Microsoft AJAX Minifier with Visual Studio 2010 1-click publish. This is a response to that question. The Web Publishing Pipeline is pretty extensive so it is easy for us to hook in to it in order to perform operation such as these. One of those extension points, as we’ve blogged about befo...
Back in November I participated in Virtual Tech Days which is an online conference presented by Microsoft. In the session I discussed the enhancements to web deployment using Visual Studio 2010 and MSDeploy. Some of the topics which I covered includ: You can download the video & all of my sample files at http:...
One of the really cool features that we shipped for Visual Studio 2010 was web.config (XDT) transformations. Because the transformations are so simple and straightforward one of the first questions that someone asks after using it is “how can I use this in my other projects?” Unfortunately this feature is only built into the Web Application Project...
Today I just saw a question posted on stackoverflow.com asking Why are some Web.config transforms tokenised into SetParameters.xml and others are not? Let me give some background on this topic for those who are not aware of what the question is. With Visual Studio 2010 when you package your application using the Build Deployment Package cont...
I just saw a post on Twitter asking the question Is there any easy way to see the underlying MSBuild command when building in VS2010? Want to see the MSDeploy params. @wdeploy?One thing to know is that when you publish from Visual Studio, by default we use the MSDeploy (AKA Web Deployment Tool) Object Model in order...
DIsclaimer: You may experience some in-consistent behavior using this technique. If so please let us know. I have heard a lot of questions and confusion regarding web.debug.config and web.release.config. For example here is just one question on StackOverflow. The question states: First let me explain, as I did to that question, the purpose of the ...
A few months ago, we have a blog talking about extending the web publishing pipeline to package database project deployed SQL file. In this blog, I’ll show step by step example of packaging web application with SQL Server database upgrade SQL file using Visual Studio 2010. This way, we can generate a web package with incremental SQL scr...
When a zip package is built from VS2010 web application UI (via Build Deployment Package command), or through command line (msbuild myproject.csproj /t:package), a few files are generated in the destination folder. Here’s some brief description: It’s very common to deploy our package to a IIS7 virtual application under Default Web ...
