I have an ASP.NET application that has two very large folders within the application on the production side: One for images and another for App_Themes. They grow dynamically from user input and customization. There are similar folders in my dev application, which have only some sample data for testing.
I am using web deploy through Visual Studio 2010 to publish my site to the production server. I have changed my .csproj file settings to exclude these two folders from deployment and have also checked the “leave extra files on destination” checkbox. However, the publishing still takes a long time. I think the reason is related to web deploy checking all the files in the images folder and the App_Themes folder on the server.
Is there a solution that would solve the publishing problem? I would like to continue using web deploy because it is really practical compared to other methods of publishing. The server is running IIS 6.
You can publish the way you’re doing it, but into a local directory. It should be quick that way. Then set up a robocopy job ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robocopy ) to sync the local publish directory with the web server. Robocopy can be fired off via a .bat file (I bet you can even chain it somehow to the completion of the publish) and is very configurable allowing you to specify files or directories to omit.