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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-30T16:45:44+00:00

We have a small team of two developers (PC) and two designers (Mac). As

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We have a small team of two developers (PC) and two designers (Mac). As we’re an ad agency rather than a code shop we don’t get to spend lots on software tools. We used to use Visual Studio years ago but now we use Visual Web Developer to create ASP.NET sites (.NET4 support – can’t afford new VS licences). We create the sites as Web Site projects (rather than Web Apps, or MVC) and we run on a dedicated dev box (Win 2008 rc2 server).

TortoiseHg is the latest I’ve been playing with and the difference between Hg and Git are negligibility considering our needs. So we can run with either.

What I’m trying to do is find a relatively simple way of deploying sites/commits using freely available tools/services that works well with the tech/software that we use.

I don’t mind lots of faffing to set up the solution if it can be setup up once on say one of our server but could deploy to multiple locations. I’ve been looking and CI server (Jenkins/Hudson) but they seem to be overkill for what we require. Do we need a build server for a 50 off web pages and associated assets?

I tried the Mercurial HgWebDir setup thing – too many potential problems with Hg/Python versions and the setup time is too long per production server – I had to download the source, make a change and rebuild it… OTT. Git seems to work best with SSH, again, more 3rd party stuff.

Is there any Windows based software that we can install on the production server or on a central server that will aid with simple deployment (ie copy latest changes to website directory and rollback) that doesn’t cost the earth (preferably free) and doesn’t rely on getting the right versions of this and that to work properly.

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  1. Editorial Team

    Let’s imagine that you have choosen AppHarbor for your .NET hosting.

    They give you a GIT repository where you can have your source code and upon each push to appharbor they will automatically build your solution and make it available online.

    With this in mind, you can have a branch to be your production and everything else to help and to be used to host the source code and help files for example.

    If you choose a hosting company that only provide you with an FTP upload feature, either you use a automatic script to publish the data from your commit (using webhooks you can easily fire a web script that will pick up the changes (or the entire repo) and publish on the web).

    Either way is good, it’s always up to you, what are you guys willing to try, and keep trying alternatives until all of you are happy with the result.

    With this, you can simply use Visual Studio and Tortoise GIT or even install GIT Extension in Visual Studio and use no more software…

    Using Git with Visual Studio

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