Deploying your web application to a server is something that all (successful) projects need to do.  Without good tools to help you, deployment can be a cumbersome task – especially if you need to do it manually.

VS 2010 includes a bunch of improvements that make it much easier to deploy your ASP.NET web applications – and which enable you to build automated deployment procedures that make deployment easily reproducible.  The deployment features support not just deploying your web content – but also support customizing your web.config file settings, deploying/updating your databases, and managing your other dependencies.  You can kick-off deployments manually – or via automated scripts or as part of an automated build or continuous integration process.

Below is a high-level overview of some of the key new web deployment features in VS 2010.  I’ll do subsequent posts that provide more details on how to use/customize each of them.