Republished with Permission - Original Article

This is the twenty-eighth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the VS 2010 and .NET 4 release.

This blog post continues a series of posts I’m doing that cover the new improvements we made around web deployment.  In my first post in the deployment series I provided an overview of the new VS 2010 Web Deployment features.

In today’s post I’m going to be discussing Microsoft Web Deploy – which is a free server technology that enables a comprehensive publishing and deployment mechanism. Web Deploy enables you to not only publish files – but also provision database schema/data, run database change scripts, set security ACLs, and more.  All of these deployment steps can be automated using Visual Studio.

This post will provide a step by step tutorial on how to install Web Deploy and enable it on a web-server.  I’ll then demonstrate how you can use Visual Studio 2010 to directly publish to servers using Web Deploy, as well as how you can use Visual Studio to create installation packages that you can use to automate the deployment of your applications.