I currently maintain several different environments for a single application - production, staging, development, etc .
I was wondering if there was a setting or an add-in for visual studio that would facilitate publishing to multiple deployment targets (preferabbly with a different web.config for each target)?
I'm considering writing a couple of nant scripts instead but it would be nice if there was an integrated solution.
It's not possible in VS 2008 out of the box. I don't know if there's an addin for this, but you could try searching VisualStudio Gallery.
From what I've seen from demo videos, VS2010 will support having different web.configs, and deploying to dev/staging/production.
Related
It looks like Visual Studio 2012 will not include Visual Studio Setup and Deployment Projects according to MSDN, so I'm currently learning WiX.
Will this loss of functionality extend to Web Deployment Projects?
Web Deployment Projects will NOT be available in VS2012.
Instead we will focus on bringing first class publishing support for Website projects. You can read more details at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdev/archive/2012/08/06/plans-regarding-website-projects-and-web-deployment-projects.aspx. In a nutshell, you will have all the same features that WDP has, but a lot more as well. Also another good thing about this is that we will have one experience for both Web App Project as well as Website Project. So when we make enhancements both project systems get it.
If you had any customizations in your WDP, you should be able to copy/paste those into the new web publish profiles (they are MSBuild as well). Take a look at the blog above and please do let me know if you have any concerns.
I'm note sure if the links from user1069816 are relevant.
Visual Studio 2012 has an unsure inclusion of Web Deployment projects, but you can do something about it.
Vote for their inclusion: http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/2639368-add-web-deployment-projects-to-vs11
It looks like Web Deployment Projects will still exist in Visual Studio 2012 according to:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd394698(v=vs.110)
and
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/aspnetue/archive/2012/06/12/visual-studio-2012-rc-deployment-documentation-published.aspx
Today I tried to use the publishing feature with visual studio, which creates an application manifest, and not a traditional exe.
What are the benefits of this?
I noticed each time the app starts up it does some kind of check before launching in?
When using Publish on a Windows application, you create a ClickOnce installer. You can find a lot of information about that in the official documentation. Basically, this is an alternative to creating a conventional MSI-based setup project (File/New/Project/Other Project Types/Setup and Deployment/Setup Project).
On MSDN you can find a comparison of the two approaches.
I have developed an ASP.NET web application in visual studio 2008. I want to run the same application on another system, but Visual Studio is not installed on that system. Is there a way I can run without visual studio?
I heard about deploying, but I don't know much about it.
You can publish your site from Visual Studio to a server that's running IIS, more info here:
How to: Publish Web Application Projects
You can use the built-in deployment features of Visual Studio (right click on the web project, select publish and follow the prompts) or you can simply copy all the dlls plus your content files from the web project to the IIS folder you want to deploy to (known as xcopy deployment). You could also deploy via a setup project, which will create an MSI package, but that's a bit more work. Here's a couple of links that might help, but you can do a search for the options described above and you will find plenty of resources:
Deploying ASP.NET Applications - Part 1
Deploying ASP.NET Applications - Part 2
I have successfully managed to create Visual Studio starter kits in the past, however as far as I am aware they can only be made at the project level.
I have a solution that contains multiple projects that I want to distribute throughout an organisation for several software projects.
The starter kit that I want to make is at the solution level, and contains multiple visual studio projects, that are clearly seperated, ( e.g. seperate code and test projects).
Does Visual Studio 2008 support this, and if so how is it done ?
I found the solution here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms364046(VS.80).aspx#creatstrtkt_topic3
Instead of deleteing this I thougt that it would be useful reference for someone else.
How do I publish a C++/CLI Windows Forms project for ClickOnce deployment? The properties window for C++/CLI projects does not include a "Publish" tab (like in the C# projects).
You can follow the guidelines for manually deploying a ClickOnce application on MSDN.
This relies on the Windows Software Development Kit and command line tools instead of Visual Studio to do your deployment.
Just another note with this - if you can, I'd recommend trying to migrate to /clr:pure if possible. If you're working with native code, this won't work, but if it's a pure windows forms app, it will make the deployment scenario simpler, since you'll have fewer issues in ClickOnce with CAS requirements.
You cannot ClickOnce deploy an exe written in unmanaged code. The standard approach is to create a managed code stub exe that would launch your actual application.
Here's a related question.