Newbie - how to publish project

[AAJ]

Hi all

I knows there are tutorials out there, but I'm wondering how you guys manage
the publishing/updating of websites in the real world.

It seems I have 2 options, Publish and copy. As far as I can tell

If I choose publish, my Web site is compiled and then copied to the web
server without the .cs files.

If I choose copy, all the files are copied over, and when someone browses
the site, each page is compiled in turn.

My colleague uses Dreamweaver for ASP programming, and it seems to have the
sensible option of using PUT, so only changed pages are transferred over.

So I suppose my question is...

If I build a site on my local server, should I copy it with .cs files to the
live server, or should I publish the compiled version.

Once the live site is being used, if I change a few pages on my local
server, I don't want to stop users from using the site as I update. So what
happens if I publish, will there be any interruptions as it transfers the
new site, does it just transfer the changes, if it transfers the whole site,
does the web server keep working until the transfer is complete, and the
switch to the new stuff.

On the other hand, If I choose copy, is it the done thing having the .cs
files on the live server (In this application I'm not too worried about the
compile time the first time a page is run). It looks as though it follows
the dream weaver method of allowing you to selectively choose the files to
upload, although it seems to be a bit hit and miss on my machine, it comes
up with question marks until I've synched the whole project...

so any advise, references for best practices would be welcome

thanks

Andy

 

[Mark Rae]

I knows there are tutorials out there, but I'm wondering how you guys
manage the publishing/updating of websites in the real world.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/reference/infrastructure/wdp/

 

[Morten Wennevik]

Hi Andy,

When publising directly to the server, the server won't go down while the
update is happening, but the web application will be taken offline.
Visual Studio puts a app_offline.htm in your web application. Any users
browsing to your app will get routed to this file. When the update is
complete, the app_offline.htm is deleted and your web application is back
online.

If you publish to your local computer, and copy/paste the files to the
server, the same thing will happen although this time the user may get a
server unavailable or similar error.