Until now I've been using the "Publish..." command on my Web Application Project to prepare them for deployment. This has been working fine for me until now because I want to run a custom MsBuild task to modify the output files of the build. Therefore I started to try out the WDP.

My first surprise when using the WDP was that it doesn't respect what files are included in my web application project. Some older .aspx files that I had excluded showed up in the deployed site and worst of all, all my .svn folder, my lib folder (with required assembly references and the obj folder also got copied to the output. This does not happen with the "Publish..." command since it only publishes files that are included in the Web Application being published.

I know that I can exclude files and folders by adding  <ExcludeFromBuild /> tags to the <ItemGroup> tag but doing that for every file/folder I want to exclude just doesn' seem right! Why doesn't the WDP repect the included/excluded files of my Web application project?