Publishing an ASP.NET Web Application

Visual Studio provides a dedicated tool/wizard for publishing ASP.NET web applications. Using this tool, you can take an existing web application project, compile it, bundle all the folders, files, settings, and databases that are used by that application into a web package, and then deploy that package to a web server. One advantage to compiling your website before deploying is that the compiler finds compile-time errors for you before deploying onto the target server. Another advantage you gain by compiling your application is increased page performance. Because all the pages within the site are precompiled, the need to compile dynamically during the first page hit is removed.

Let’s continue with a brief walk-through of the publishing process. The Web Publish process is kicked off via the Build menu’s Publish command (see Figure 11.4) or by right-clicking on the web application project in Solution Explorer and selecting Publish.

FIGURE 11.4 Launching the Web Publishing tool.

The first screen asks for the deployment target to use.