I’ll be speaking at the Ann Arbor Day of .Net on Saturday, May 1st, 2010. It’s being held at Washtenaw Community College. Register for the event at http://www.dayofdotnet.org/AnnArbor/Spring2010/Registration.aspx
Here’s the abstract for my talk:
The Demise of Xcopy Deployment
One of the great features of .Net when it first released was Xcopy deployment. No more .dll registrations, just copy the files to the web server. While this was a great feature for Microsoft developers, new problems emerged, specifically around managing web.config. Sections like connection strings and custom errors need to be managed between environments, which meant many copies of the files or scripts to change them. Other necessary steps, like managing permissions and IIS configuration were still outside the Xcopy process. A recent tool, MSDeploy, is now integrated into Visual Studio 2010 and makes managing these issues easier. Besides web.config, MSDeploy also manages file deployments and synchronization, ACLs, and IIS settings. If your deployments have multiple steps, need ReadMe files, or can’t be done by someone outside your team, you need to learn MSDeploy!
