Selecting a Target

The publishing process is driven by a profile. This is a collection of settings that define the parameters of the deployment target. You can either create your own profile (as you would if you were publishing to an internal web server, to your own development machine, or to a corporate IT/enterprise asset), or you can use a profile bundled with Visual Studio (such as Windows Azure) or provided by a third party (as would be the case if you were publishing your web application to a third-party hosting provider).

On this first page of the Publish tool, we have an option to publish to Windows Azure (which we’ll cover in-depth in Chapter 12). If you are using a third-party hosting provider, and that provider has a profile file available, you can import it by using the Import option. In this chapter, we’ll look at the Custom option that allows us to create our own deployment target (see Figure 11.5).

FIGURE 11.5 Selecting a publish target.

When we select the Custom target option, we are prompted to name the profile, and then we need to set the connection parameters for our target.