Question

I’ve been using mouse right click in Visual Studio to publish sites for ages and everything worked great except there’s been too much manual works. Recently I changed to using build script to call aspnet_compiler to publish ASP.NET web application. In my build script I would do something like below:

sh "#{aspnet_compiler} -p ../src/webapp -v targetDir ./publish –u"

My project directory structure looks like this:

/build/rakefile.rb
/build/publish/ --published site goes here
/src/website/bll/ --business logic goes here
/src/website/ --aspx pages
/src/website/code/ --some c# code

When calling aspnet-compiler everything worked fine except the c# code under /src/website/code/ would not be compiled. It seems to me that aspnet-compiler compiled c# code under bll directory then xcopied everything under /src/website/ to the publish directory (including /src/website/code/). I don’t know if I am not using the correct switch calling aspnet-compiler or this is the desired behaviour?

Please help thanks!

Answer 1

I figured out my own problem.

First of all my rake build script end up looking like this:

sh "#{aspnet_compiler} -f -fixednames -u -p ../src/website -v / ./publish"

Second the output behaviour of mouse right click on “publish” within Visual Studio is different from calling aspnet_compiler.

Right click publish will:

• directly copy Global.asax
• only generate .dll and .pdb (.pdb file can be deleted if debugging is not required) files under bin directory

where when calling aspnet_compiler:

• will compile Global.asax into App_global.asax.compiled and App_global.asax.dll under bin directory
• will also generate PrecompiledApp.config (this is because I’ve specified aspx pages should be updatable)

There was a clean up task after publish task that basically deleted anything other than .dll extension under bin.

Anyway now I’ve learnt something new.