Chapter 13: Deploying an ASP.NET Application

Overview

In this chapter, you will learn how to:

• Store application-specific configuration settings for easy deployment.

• Set up a target IIS application.

• Copy content, Web Forms pages, Web services, and assemblies.

• Deploy an application using Visual Studio .NET.

Deploying applications has been a long-standing bane of many a classic ASP developer’s existence, and for good reason. While it was easy enough to deploy or replace static content and the ASP files themselves, other portions of the applications, such as components and application-specific configuration settings, required greater effort to deploy and often necessitated a shutdown of the application to replace.

Deployment is another area in which the improvements in ASP.NET truly shine. ASP.NET eliminates many of the deployment shortcomings in classic ASP, making it possible for the first time to deploy an ASP.NET application simply by copying all of the necessary files to the IIS application directory where the application will be deployed. This chapter will discuss the steps for deploying ASP.NET Web applications, both manually and through Microsoft Visual Studio .NET.