Using MSBuild 4 command line to publish ASP.NET web application

In previous msbuild we used the target '_CopyWebApplication' in order to build and convert the source of a project into a published site, this worked OK, but wasn't ideal.

In .NET 4, the publishing process is somewhat more sophisticated and additionally seems a bit of a black box to understand.

Whilst packages look great, I cannot fully understand how they can be harnessed by a build server, the build server would not get any manifest information, and equally, something (msbuild?) is CREATING this manifest information FROM the project file.

In our build server, I ideally want to say, here is my csproj file, deploy it by the package configuration 'x'.

I'm trying to understand the workflow I need to make this happen.

Right now when I use _CopyWebApplication, the resu开发者_如何学Golt is different to doing a publish from visual studio 2010, primarily that web.config transforms aren't processed, and obviously msdeploy isn't involved at all.

Can somebody point me in the right direction, I believe I need to get msbuild to do the equiv of 'Build Deployment Package', and then use msdeploy to deploy this from our build server to our CI testing environments.

I know this is a very vague post, but I hope somebody can give me some hints, I'll be continuing research also, so if I make any progress, I'll post my findings here.

Thanks in advance, Stephen.

In terms of using msbuild to create a package, this is a great link:

http://vishaljoshi.blogspot.com/2009/02/web-packaging-creating-web-packages.html

The next steps are using msdeploy to deploy that package, which is somewhat of an adjacent issue.

Check out the five parts in the You're deploying it wrong! TeamCity, Subversion & Web Deploy series. Should give you everything you need.