Microsoft announced some important improvements in the Visual Studio 2012 Web Deploy.
I noticed that when you install the new Windows Azure SDK for Visual Studio 2010, you will also get the same updates for the Visual Studio 2010 Web Publishing Experience.
These updates include some of the following features:
- Updated Web Publish dialog
- Support to import publish profiles (.publishSettings files)
- Support to configure EF Code First migrations during publish
- Support to create web packages in the publish dialog
- Publish profiles now a part of the project and stored in version control by default
- Publish profiles are now MSBuild files
- Profile specific web.config transforms
After installing the SDK, you get a new Publish dialog:
You can now import a .publishsettings file(provided by many web host sites and by Windows Azure) and you can also manage your publish profiles.
One of the things I like the most is that these publish profiles are now stored as a part of your project under the folder Properties\PublishProfiles as .pubxml files:
These .pubxml files are just normal MSBuild files so you can modify these files in order to customize the publish process. You can also leverage these publish profiles to simply publishing from the command line:
msbuild.exe SOFAServicesHost.csproj /p:DeployOnBuild=true;PublishProfile="SOFA – Release";Password={INSERT-PASSWORD}