Visual Studio 2005 Web Deployment Projects

In the recent weeks, I came across the following questions from different people:

1. While deploying my website, how can I update only the assemblies for recent changes?

2. How to use aspnet_compiler.exe for packaging and release management scenarios?

3. How to have get a single file assembly instead of bunch of cryptic auto generated assemblies?

This page: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479044.aspx provides answers for all those above questions.

In short:

1. Precompile a Web site using the aspnet_compiler.exe command-line tool
2. For packaging and release management, use fixednames option of the aspnet_compiler.exe command-line tool
3. Use aspnet_merge to merge the Dll's.
4. Also to make your life easy, downlaod and implement the "Visual Studio 2005 Web Deployment Projects" which 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

You may find more information at the following link AND/OR doing a search for “Visual Studio 2005 Web Deployment Projects”.
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/asp.net/aa336619.aspx
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479568.aspx

A good example is present here: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2005/11/06/429723.aspx