What's the XAP file equivalent of ASP.NET

Is there such a thing? Maybe there should be, I don't think Microsoft built a开发者_高级运维nything like this but is there a similar format or framework for ASP.NET that let's you deploy an archive -- that is -- your ASP.NET web application, or module that works in the same way?

A xap file is a self-contained archive. I'm particularly interested in the things they're showing with Silverlight 4 and application partitioning. In that you can drop in additional xap files that extend or show up as new things in your app without recompiling the existing stuff.

I guess the closest thing would be an assembly. It is totally possible to compile an ASP.NET website into a single assembly. Basically you would need to compile your project normally, then precompile the website and then you could combine all those resulting assemblies into a single assembly using ILMerge.

You can wrap your application in with the Web Platform Installer and get a single deployable installer for your entire site and the common major dependencies/frameworks, this is the closet equivalent that I'm aware of. Some popular projects have deployments available in this fashion, see here for a list.

Hanselman did a post on how to package your app this way that might be a good starting point to get a feel for the process.