Building website deployment packages
Websites can be packaged into ZIP files and deployed to remote servers using MSDeploy; these packages can be used by system administrators or developers to deploy websites to the appropriate environment for testing or a live roll-out.
Manually publishing websites to the filesystem
We can manually build packages in Visual Studio, which, as I've said, is probably not a good idea for deployment packages (even if you're a lone developer with a limited budget, you can use the Visual Studio Online TFS build server, which gives you 60 minutes per month build time for free); however, it can actually be really useful to check that all the website content such as HTML pages, stylesheets, and scripts have been included, and that Web.config transforms have worked.
We'll look at manually creating a package in the following procedure:
- Right-click on a web project and select Publish.
- Click on the Custom button, and then enter a name in the New Custom Profile...
