How to deploy web app directly from Visual Studio 2008?

Question

I used to use discountasp.net and I can use Visual Studio 2008 to "publish" the website directly to the web host. I am using a dedicated server now (well, to be exact, Amazon EC2 Windows), how should I setup the web server so I can deploy the website directly from VS 2008? I tried to setup a FTP server but couldn't get it working.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Here is a tutorial from the official Amazon EC2 deverloper site ("Deploy ASP.NET application to Amazon EC2 like a typical remote server. This tutorial shows you how")

If you need to deploy an ASP.NET application directly from Microsoft Visual Studio, you can use the Copy Web Site Wizard available in Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and later.

The Copy Web Site Wizard allows you to deploy applications using File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or Microsoft Office FrontPage Server Extensions. To use FTP, you must install the FTP component of IIS as well as permit ports 20 and 21 through the firewall using the ec2-authorize command.

[...]

With Amazon EC2, you can deploy ASP.NET applications on dedicated Windows instances running in Amazon’s data centers. To deploy the application, you need to create an instance based on an AMI template. After creating the instance, you access the administrator password, then configure a firewall rule and Remote Desktop to the server. To provide persistent storage, you create an EBS volume, and then set up IIS and the ASP.NET application. You can deploy ASP.NET applications to the server with tools like Visual Studio or through FTP.

From: Deploying ASP.NET Applications on Amazon EC2 (via archive.org)

Answer 2

If you want to run an ASP.NET application on Amazon EC2, you might want to consider using AppHarbor. AppHarbor let's you take advantage of Amazons scalable and stable platform, without having to install, manage and update servers yourself. AppHarbor also makes deployment a snap, using your choice of Git, Mercurial, Subversion or TFS.