How do I get Visual Studio's "Publish Website" to 1. not overwrite web.config & 2. promote copies of dlls that were referenced from my GAC

Question

I started using a a library which I reference from the GAC during development. I want the dll included in the project bin directory when I promote it to the webserver. I also need my local and the server web.config to be different. Before I started using this library I really enjoyed using the publish website feature of VS. Now it just seems to be getting in the way.

Answer 1

Regarding the web.config deployment problem: Scott Guthrie wrote about here:

Tip/Trick: Automating Dev, QA, Staging, and Production Web.Config Settings with VS 2005

You can easily automate the configuration process within the Visual Studio build environment (and do so in a way that works both within the IDE, as well as with command-line/automated builds).

Answer 2

Current configuration with the publish tool will send the web.config to the final site, and as far as I know there is no way around this.

Visual Studio 2010 is going to offer the ability to have targeted configurations allowing the deployment process to push out a different configuration.

As for the .dll reference, I believe the only way to get that to work is if you have "Copy Local" set to true on the reference.