Publishing vs Copying

Question

What is the difference between publishing a website with visual studio and just copying the files over to the server? Is the only difference that the publish files are pre-compiled?

Answer 1

There is not much difference between "publish", and copying the files. Publish appears in a webapplication. The only difference really is publishing gives you the option to only include html and dll's, where as copying you would need to parse out source code manually. There is no full precompiling in the publish option, as Fully precompiled means no HTML at all; The aspx files are just placeholders; All html is in the compiled binaries.