Could someone please provide a walkthrough for deploying a SQL Server / VC# app?

I have just completed (basically) a beginner's database application with SQL Server and Visual C#. 开发者_StackOverflow社区I am using Visual C# Express, not the full-scale Visual Studio thing, which apparently makes deploying the application properly a bit more complicated. I've seen where some other people have asked about how to deploy such an application from that IDE, but I'm not able to fully understand and use some of the answers that they've been getting back.

Therefore I must ask how to deploy this application properly, but I must also ask that there be a simple walkthrough given. College doesn't teach much about how to deploy these things, so I'm very newbish at it. Thanks!

I don't know of an automated way to deploy the database. If it's the first time the database is hitting the server, I backup on the source, and restore on the target...simple.

As far as the code, here's what I do:

1. Publish (right-click, Publish) the code to a local directory (I use C:\Websites\SiteName).
2. Use and ftp client to promote the output to the server.
3. Make any necessary adjustments to the web.config to point correctly to your target database.

When and if you need to make changes later, you might want to consider a tool I use for this purpose, BeyondCompare. It can perform a diff between your local files and the target site via FTP, and tell you exactly what you need to deploy to make it work. This won't detect changes in your db, however, though there are plenty of Sql diff tools along the same lines. My general principle is "make the local site work perfectly, and then make the target site just like the local site".

Things to watch for in #3 above are that the target address is right in the connection string, along with whatever security credentials you will need to connect to the db.

HTH.