What is the Visual Studio's Web Deploy "Mark as an IIS Application on destination" mean?

when I'm trying to deploy to an IIS7 website using Web Deploy, one of t开发者_如何学运维he options is to Mark as an IIS Application on destination.

What does this mean when have it ticked on or off?

When setting this option your site becomes an Virtual Application as opposed to a Virtual Directory.
For the differences between the two see: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/wenlong/archive/2006/11/22/virtual-application-vs-virtual-directory.aspx

Here is the relevant text from Oded's reference....

6.If you are not deploying IIS settings, select the Mark as IIS application on destination check box.

This option is not shown if you are deploying IIS settings, because the Web project's IIS application status is one of the IIS settings that is deployed.

You typically select this check box when the Include all IIS settings as configured in IIS Manager check box on the Package/Publish Web tab of the project Properties page is cleared. There are very few scenarios in which you would not want to deploy a Web project as an IIS application on the destination Web server. For example, suppose that the project that you are deploying is not actually a Web application but only contains virtual directory content, such as images, XML files, and so forth. In that case, you might want to clear this check box so that the deployed project is not set up as an IIS application.

It causes the deployed project to be setup as an IIS application on the destination.

If you uncheck it, the project will not be setup as an IIS application.

See step 6 of Creating a Publish Profile on this MSDN article, in particular the last sentence.