Later this week Microsoft is shipping on the web a new free add-on to Visual Studio that enables what we call “Visual Studio 2005 Web Deployment Projects”. This add-on provides a lot of additional deployment features and...
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Later this week Microsoft is shipping on the web a new free add-on to Visual Studio that enables what we call “Visual Studio 2005 Web Deployment Projects”. This add-on provides a lot of additional deployment features and capabilities that complement the built-in web project support in the product. The below blog post provides a quick overview of some of the new things coming. There are also some MSDN whitepapers that will document it more exhaustively over the next week as well. Some background The web project model changed in a number of ways between VS 2003 and VS 2005. There was a lot of discussion this August over missing features that weren’t supported or were broken by it in Beta2 (examples: exclude file from project support, file-based assembly refreshes, the ability to not check-in \bin assemblies in source control, etc). These specific issues were fixed in the final release of VS 2005, and a number of folks who previously had a lot of concerns have posted positive impressions of the new model lately. One of the things we on the team still weren’t happy with, though, was the level of support in the vanilla product for more advanced deployment configurations/options beyond the core "Publish Web" scenarios built-into VS 2005 – specifically around assembly naming/output, advanced MSBuild customization, and other common scenarios that we’ve heard requests for over the years (for example: the ability to modify connection string settings depending on the build configuration, etc). A couple of guys on my team have cranked over the last 2 months adding richer support for these scenarios that integrate nicely in the shipping product. We’ve packaged up this work in a new free download we call “VS 2005 Web Deployment Projects” and which we worked to make sure was available for download this week (which is the week of VS 2005 launch -- so basically immediately when the product releases). This download does not touch any shipping binaries within VS 2005, but instead uses the extensibility support within the IDE and ASP.NET to integrate in a fairly cool way. We think the resulting feature-set offers the best of both worlds – specifically the productivity benefits of rapid development brought with the new dynamic web project model, as well as the richness of a highly customized build/deployment system. VS 2005 Web Deployment Project Feature-Set The VS 2005 Web Deployment Project download adds a number of features that integrate nicely inside VS 2005 including: 1) More control over the number of assemblies generated by a pre-compiled web project, as well as control over their naming. Specifically, you can now generate a single named assembly for all pages + classes in your web project (for example: MyCompany.MyWebApp.dll). Alternatively, you can also now optionally generate a separate named assembly for each directory of pages/controls in your project (for example: MyCompany.MyWebApp.SubFolder1.dll and MyCompany.MyWebApp.SubFolder2.dll). This later option is particularly useful for large content web-apps where you would like the ability to incrementally patch code updates. 2) The ability to utilize the full power of MSBuild to customize your build process. You can now use MSBuild to define pre and post build rules, exclude folders from building, automatically create IIS vdirs and site mappings, add custom assembly versioning information, and add any custom MSBuild task you want to your build process. A VS 2005 Web Deployment Project stores all of its settings inside an MSBuild based project-file. It also adds support for opening and editing the web deployment MSbuild project file directly in the IDE (w/ full intellisense support for it) – something that actually isn’t supported by any other project type in VS. 3) The ability to define and use custom build-configurations inside Visual Studio, and define per-build configuration options. In addition to using the built-in “debug” and “release” configurations, for example, you could define custom build configurations like “staging”. You can then vary your web deployment MSBuild tasks
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