Web Deploy is a free technology built by my team that can improve web deployment. It is a deployment service that runs on a server, and enables you to either locally or remotely deploy applications onto it.  Web Deploy includes built-in support for creating virtual directories and applications within IIS, copying files and folders, provisioning databases (both SQL Server and MySQL), setting file-system ACLs and more (it even includes built-in providers for things like setting registry entries, registering COM components, etc).  In addition to having these built-in deployment features, it also supports a .NET based provider API that enables you to create and plug-in your own custom deployment actions – which allow you to customize it however you want.

The wire-protocol for Web Deploy is HTTPS – which means Web Deploy can be used through firewalls (enabling easy, secure, deployment to remote hosted servers).  Web Deploy also supports both admin and non-admin deployment scenarios.  The non-admin scenarios enable administrators to configure Web Deploy on a server, and then delegate a subset of deployment capabilities to developers who do not have admin accounts on the production server.  This enables a very secure and flexible deployment approach.  I’ll cover the configuration steps to enable delegated deployment scenarios in my next blog post in this series.