VS 2005 Web Deployment Projects

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Some advantages of Web Deployment Project :
1) You can now generate a single named assembly for all pages + classes in your web project (for example: MyCompany.MyWebApp.dll). Alternatively, you can also now optionally generate a separate named assembly for each directory of pages/controls in your project (for example: MyCompany.MyWebApp.SubFolder1.dll and MyCompany.MyWebApp.SubFolder2.dll). This later option is particularly useful for large content web-apps where you would like the ability to incrementally patch code updates.

2) You can now use MSBuild to define pre and post build rules, exclude folders from building, automatically create IIS vdirs and site mappings, add custom assembly versioning information, and add any custom MSBuild task you want to your build process. VS 2005 Web Deployment Project stores all of its settings inside an MSBuild based project-file (XML).

3) The ability to define and use custom build-configurations inside Visual Studio, and define per-build configuration options. In addition to using the built-in “debug” and “release” configurations, for example, you could define custom build configurations like “staging”. You can then vary your web deployment MSBuild tasks and actions based on these.

4) The ability to customize and modify a web application’s web.config file at deployment. There is now IDE support for changing values likes connectionstrings or app-settings as part of the build process. You can also vary these values based on the VS build configuration – so for example you could have one set of connectionstrings that you use for development (when you have the build configuration set to “debug”), and then have them modified as part of the build-process to your test/staging or production databases when you choose a “staging” or “release” build configuration in the IDE.

Example Walkthrough of using a VS 2005 Web Deployment Project
(Scott's example)