Currently we deploy compiled ASP.Net applications by publishing the web site locally and emailing a zip file to the system administrator with a (usually) lengthy set of instructions for deployment. This is because the first time we deployed an ASP.Net application to a customer the dev and test IIS instance were the same, and we were unable to deploy the site twice to the same machine. This set the tone for deployment on all subsequent projects.
I am now evaluating our deployment methods and am looking specifically at the built in deployment tools; specifically I’m looking at custom installation tasks and using as much of the standard installer functionality as I can (mostly the user interface).
Secondly, I’m looking at merging deployments and automatic updates.
How do you go about deploying sofware in your organisation? What tools do you use, and what problems do you come across most frequently?
Deploy Web Applications Using the Copy Web Tool
Text from Microsoft Training Kit Book Web Based Development
Web Setup Projects are useful if you are providing a Web application to many users (for example, allowing people to download the application from the Web and install it). If you are responsible for updating a specific Web site for your organization, it’s impractical to log on to the Web server and install a Windows Installer package each time you make an update. For internal applications, you can edit the Web application directly on the Web server. However, changes you make are immediately implemented in your production Web application, and this includes any bugs that might be there. To enable yourself to test a Web application, you can edit a local copy of the Web application on your computer and publish changes to the production Web server using the Copy Web tool. You can also use the Copy Web tool to publish changes from a staging server to a production Web server, or between any two Web servers. The Copy Web tool can copy individual files or an entire Web site to or from a source Web site and a remote Web site. You can also choose to synchronize files, which involves copying only changed files and detecting possible versioning conflicts in which the same file on both the source and remote site have been separately edited. The Copy Web tool cannot merge changes within a single file; only complete files can be copied.