I am confused with the deployment and  publishing websies. Are they same?

I want to host my asp.net as precompiled. Should I publish it or deploy it.

Thank you 

 

 

Hi,

You will get a precompiled site by publishing as well as by creating a setup.exe (setup and deployment)

The difference between the two is that:

Publishing: you right click on the website and click on 'Publish Web Site'. Here you can specify a folder where the precompiled website will be published. Then you can ftp the website. Other option is you can directly specify the ftp location.

Setup and Deployment: you create a new setup and deployment project, add the project output and finally create a setup.exe file. You need to login into the server on which you want to install the application. There you need to run the setup.exe file.

So, if you are hosting your application on a shared hosting environment, you should use publishing. And if you are creating a web application product to be downloaded from your  website, you should ideally create a setup.exe (deploy).

 

Unfortunately, I am not sure that silentBay understands the difference between publishing and web deployment as it pertains to this forum. This is a forum for Web Deployment 2.0 which is a free Add-In to Visual Studio 2005 and can be downloaded from asp.net. It does not involve creating setup.exe projects or deployment by that method. That is actually a third alternative and would only be used in cases where you were packaging an installation for a remote or customer site. To understand what Web Deployment is and the difference between it and publishing, you should watch the video on the asp.net site. The following should be the link to it...

 http://www.asp.net/learn/videos/view.aspx?tabid=63&id=15

 

Hi,

Firstly: The question asked by andy_dev_in is "Difference between deployment and publishing". So in my previous post I have answered to this question only.

Secondly: “Visual Studio 2005 Web Deployment Projects”  is a new free add-on to Visual Studio.  This add-on provides a lot of additional deployment features and capabilities that complement the built-in web project support in the product."

Do read Scott's article: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2005/11/06/429723.aspx on "VS 2005 Web Deployment Projects". In the article see that we are finally creating a .msi file for deploying the website to some web server (remote or customer site).

So, basically the add-on is facilitating us to deploy a project (definitely with lots of additional features).

Hmm. Guess my only concern is that that answer might not have been clear given that Web Deployment is the subject of the forum.

Creating a setup.exe or an MSI is not required to deploy a Web Application especially within a corporation, and as both Scott and I stated, it is an optional step. I think that the original questioner may have been asking about Web Deployment, the add-in, versus Publishing, the built in feature, but only he can say for sure.

To clarify, if I create a Web Deployment project and set its "Output Directory" in its property pages to a UNC path on the server that it is going to reside on, be it a staging server or a production server, it is in fact "deployed" just by building the Web Deployment project in the current configuration (it may also require creating the IIS Application, but that's another matter). You can also build it locally and put in an AfterBuild Project Target to do an xcopy to the remote server. And lastly you can just use an external process to manually or automatically xcopy to the destination. All of these and more are "deployment" without an MSI file. The difference in Publish vs Web Deployment is in what you are moving to the server because Web Deployment gives you far more options like number of DLL's, etc.

As well, I do not need a Web Deployment project at all to create a Setup project. It is independent of whether it takes its output from a Web Application project or a Web Deployment project. The only difference is in what it installs.

Thus, IMHO, a Web Deployment project needed to be differentiated as something separate from a Setup project.

Hope that clarifies enough for anyone, to do their own further investigation.

I had one other observation. Don't forget to uncheck the "Allow this precompiled site to be updatable" in both Publish and a Web Deployment project, because if you leave it checked you do not get a completely pre-compiled site. The ASPX, ASMX, ASHX files are copied verbatim and are dynamically compiled with that option checked. Not only that, if you use in-line code, none of that code is precompiled either.

Thnx for posting