What is a typical workflow to put my local MVC3 project on to a "live server"?

I develop on my local machine with VS2010 and SQL Server. Naturally, my web.config points to my local SQL Server and I can debug/development and all is well. Unfortunately, I am not entirely sure on how to go about deploying my code to a live server.

Currently, my live server consists of a virtual machine (my site is accessible from the internet). When I'm ready to put my changes on the live server I publish my app (right click on solution explorer -> publish). Then I go to the directory it publishes to and dump all the files into a network share that goes to my site on the live server. On the initial copy over, I have to manually edit the web.config so that the connection string points to the SQL Server on the live server instead of my local machine. So this is my first stumbling block. How can I easily manage development settings and "live" settings in the web.config?

Now, I also use version control (Kiln). Can I possibly tag a changeset and have it automatically deployed to my live server somehow? Let's say someone submits a bug and I fix it. I push my changeset and now Kiln has the latest version of my code with the bug fix. What's the best way to get these changes on to a live server?

I'm unable to find an开发者_如何学Cy documentation that covers the entire workflow but I feel like there has go to be a better way. Surely, something like this can be accomplished without having to manually edit the web.config everytime I publish and pray to the computer Gods that I didn't miss something in the connection string.

It's just me so I have complete control over all of my environments, including the server and what's accessible via the internet, and anything is possible if only I knew what to do.

How can I easily manage development settings and "live" settings in the web.config?

Re: With VS 2010 web.config transformations, it is quite easy. Please take a look at this blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdevtools/archive/2009/05/04/web-deployment-web-config-transformation.aspx

For VS 2008 or older, we used to have multiple config file based on environment and we used to create Debug/Release/DevTest/UAT/PROD release configuration and then in the post build event we used to replace the web.config with the release configuration based config. For example - if you build the project using "Prod" release configuration then we copy the PROD web.config to the publishing folder.

Now, I also use version control (Kiln). Can I possibly tag a changeset and have it automatically deployed to my live server somehow? Let's say someone submits a bug and I fix it. I push my changeset and now Kiln has the latest version of my code with the bug fix. What's the best way to get these changes on to a live server?

Re: Source control and publishing to live server are two different things. The first question you are asking here related to how you manage multiple releases and have control over bug fixes for each release. The way I would do it is I will have PROD branch in my source control which will be the first release and for every major release I will sub branch it to have more control over e-fixes.

For the other question about how to get it to live server, it depends on your environment. We do it differently based on how customer environment is setup. If they have given us the FTP, we use that or otherwise we package the application into an MSI and then deploy it to UAT.. Until UAT signoff is done, we keep on updating the MSI. Once signoff received, the MSI goes to PROD.

Hope this helps.