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Web Deploy Improvements in ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 Update

Last week Scott Guthrie announced the release of the ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 Update. This release not only offers some really nice new features for ASP.NET WebForms, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web API, SignalR and the web tooling in Visual Studio, but also adds some nice improvements to Web Deploy. (For the full list of new features, have a look at the release notes). 

What’s new?
  • First of all, Web site projects now have the same publishing experience as Web Application projects including publishing to Windows Azure Web Sites. 
  • Selective publish – for one or more files you can perform the following actions (after publishing to a Web Deploy endpoint):
    • Publish selected files.
    • See the difference between a local file and a remote file. (this even works for images!)
    • Update the local file with the remote file or update the remote file with the local file.
  • Apply config transformations on the publish profile next to the build profile.
    • This will combine the transformations you’ve specified at the build profile level with the transformations you’ve specified at the publish profile level.
    • An example:
      • “You have a QA environment and want to apply the same transformation to both a release and debug build. Before you had to configure a build configuration for every combination. In this case it was QA-Release and QA-Debug and copy the same transformation over between the 2 configs. Now you can create a config transform for QA, and keep the Release and Debug build configuration intact.”
  • One that isn’t new, but I want to mention again is the web.config transform preview. This allows you to preview the result of a transformation.It was added when releasing VS 2012 but a lot of people don’t know it exists.

PreviewTransform

For more information, have a look at the videos from Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi.

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