Visual Studio 2005 Web Deployment Projects

Visual Studio 2005 Web Deployment Projects provide additional functionality to build and deploy Web sites and Web applications in ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005. This add-in includes a tool to merge the assemblies created during ASP.NET 2.0 pre-compilation, and provides a comprehensive UI within Visual Studio 2005 to manage build configurations, merging, and using pre-build and post-build tasks with MSBuild. Download now  Note: .NET Framework 2.0 is required for this download

Overview

A Web Deployment Project creates and maintains an MSBuild project file, and is associated in a solution with a Web Site Project or Web Application Project. A Web Deployment Project enables you to manage not only build configuration and merge options, but other tasks such as specifying changes for the application's Web.config file during compilation, changing connection strings, creating virtual directories, and performing other tasks at specific points in the deployment process.

The new merge tool (aspnet_merge.exe) combines assemblies created during ASP.NET 2.0 pre-compilation for deployment. The tool supports many merge options, from combining assemblies for each Web site folder to creating a single assembly for the entire Web site.

This April 2006 release contains a merge fix to properly save web forms and other web project files using the default Windows encoding if the file does not contain a Unicode Byte Order Mark (BOM). This matches the behavior of Visual Studio 2005.

For More Information

More information can be found in these white papers.

• Using Web Deployment Projects with Visual Studio 2005. This article describes the Visual Studio 2005 Web Deployment Project add-in and how to create and manage Web Deployment Projects.
• Managing ASP.NET Pre-compiled Outputs with aspnet_merge.exe Command. This article describes the functionality of the aspnet_merge.exe command-line tool. This tool is also used by Visual Studio 2005 Web Deployment Projects.

Support

Please post your questions and feedback on the Web Deployment Projects Forum on http://www.asp.net. The Visual Studio Web project team will monitor it closely and answer quickly.

Operating Systems

Windows 2000; Windows Server 2003; Windows XP

Supported Products

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Standard Edition
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the Microsoft Office System
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Architects
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Developers
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Testers

Note: Web Deployment Projects are not supported in Visual Web Developer Express Edition.