Until now, I have used Web Deployment Projects within Visual Studio for precompiling my web applications, and I have then manually copied/ftp’d files to the live server.
I’ve been looking at the Build > Publish feature within Visual Studio (along with Web.Config transformations for Web.Release.Config etc.) and have it working so as when I publish, it outputs the files locally, but when I look at the contents of that folder, all of the ASPX files are there in full, as opposed to ‘stub’ files being generated (as they are when the project is precompiled, like when I use Web Deployment Projects). I presume this is because the project hasn’t been pre-compiled. I can’t see an option to enable pre-compilation though, on either the web application property pages, or under the publish dialog.
How do I go about using Visual Studio’s Publish facility (to take advantage of web.config transformations) but outputting a precompiled build?
It looks like VS2010 doesn’t offer the pre-compilation on either the web application property page or the publish dialog, unlike VS2012 which does.
Therefore I’ll stick to using Web Deployment Projects for anything under VS2010 or older, and will start using Pre-Compilation as part of the publish process under VS2012.