Deployment practices for .NET

Question

I have a new application i would like to deploy to a Managed Server I have recently signed up for. I would like to know what would be the best way to deploy to it. In my experience I have seen that many of the asp.net applications just push dlls to the server. How is this achieved?.

I have Tortoise SVN as my subversioning system. I have a repository on another server and usually i commit my changes and then update my release folder in the managed server but this has all the .aspx, solution and other files I belive are not needed. How can I do my set up so that I only push the dlls and when updating that only dlls are updated?.

I am not too clear on this and would like an explanation and best practices given this scenario.

Answer 1

I have faced similar questions before and follow the below steps every time I move the compiled files for incremental fixes in my application.

1. Maintain two separate copies of the solution files - Local Application and Production application //This is very important because once you go to production environment. One copy for your local working and other copy only for deploying in the live server. This copy should be up to date with your live server copy.

2. Make the changes to files and compile and test the application in your local application folder/solution. Now commit only the files that you edited. SVN will take care of this. It will show you a possible "red mark" for the files which differ from the updates present in the repository. In this way you can track the pages which were modified.

3. Now open open your production solution folder and update the folder. This will update the files in production application folder.

4. Now compile and test the changes done. Verify if its issue is fixed or the changes are reflected same as the Local application copy. Now build the application and publish to a folder.

5. To know the modified files:

DLLs:

Go to the bin location of the folder and "order by" modified date. These are the dlls which are to be copied and replaced with in your life server.

ASPX/ASCX

a) Open SVN of production application folder. Right click and click show log. This will show all the files modified/updated with date. Select the ones last updated and note down the location.

b) Now navigate to the location in your published folder and select those files "ordered by" descending/ascending modified date of the files. Replace those files alone to your LIVE server.

Note: This is certainly not the best possible solution, but one of the general practices followed throughout the industry. There are few other plugins which can track changes and publish the relevant files to your published folder. But again ,this is applicable only if you have the source codes and application files in the same machine as of the one you are hosting the application from. Let me know if you have any question in this.

Answer 2

You can just use visual studio web deploy, it will automagically figure out what needs to be updated and only pushes what is necessary unless you ask it otherwise.