I've always deployed my entire product at one time... lately I've had cause for iterative updates, and I've run into a new issue which I hope has a simple solution: whenever I publish my precompiled asp.net 2.0 app it wipes its destination clean before deploying. What follows is an example of what happens. I'm going to oversimplify my issue because the specific details are unimportant. I want to deploy a precompiled webapp named "webapp" to mysite/ I have a preexisting folder on my server called mysite/images/ with some images in it My "webapp" is a default asp.net site template made by VS2005, and consists of default.aspx, default.aspc, and web.config Whenever I publish "webapp" my images folder gets nuked. Inserting the images folder and associated images into webapp's project and having them get uploaded every publish would fix these issues but seems extremely unpractical (and unextendable to my actual problem which is quite a bit more elaborate than that). How can I tell the deployment process to leave mysite/images/ alone? Does this defeat precompilation voodoo magick? I got my hands on this: http://msdn.microsoft.com/asp.net/reference/infrastructure/wdp/default.aspx Does it expose this functionality to me? Short of using WDP to subdivide my site into folders with individual assemblies as a form of deployment damage control, I don't see how it would help me (i'd still have to publish something to the root at some point) . I'm hoping the answer is something very simple that I've overlooked. Thanks for reading
Sounds like you are doing a "Pre-compilation For Deployment" and in that instance you are going to have replace all of the files each time. If you instead do a "In Place Pre-compilation" with the aspnet_compiler tool in your C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.x.xxxx directory you will not have to replace all of the files but the In Place Pre-compilation does not have all of the advantages of the Deployment pre-compilation.
you can try the "copy website" functionality.And I guess then you can add the images to the solution. Seems practical to me. Everything needed for the site to run properly must be in the solution.