Recommended method for posting Visual Studio Projects

I'm a newbie - and I don't like to reinvent the wheel ...

What's the best way to work with Visual Studio 2003to develop a website and post it to the server?
VS seems to imply that you should just use Front Page Extensions and do all the development directly on the server. But other posts in this forum make me think that you guys who are actually working in the real world do something else.

Should I do all me development and debuggingon LocalHost, and then use FTP or another tool to upload? What's the best practice? If I already started using Front Page extenstions, should I purge the files on the server and start over?

 

In a perfect world, you will develop locally on a machine running Windows 2003 server, then publish to your live server once your changes are stable. I think it is common to develop on WinXP Pro running IIS though. Lots of ASP.Net starter tutorials will tell you how to get IIS running and make your first app if you don't know how to do it.

In terms of the actual publish, VS.Net does have a 'copy project' function as Bruce pointed to with his link. However that function copies EVERY file in your project (or at least every file required to run the app) and requires FrontPage extensions.

I wrote a tool which I use every day (and has had thousands of downloads from other users) that does a little better job. It reads ASP.Net projects and allows you to publish specific files, or only the updated files, only required files, etc. It also remembers all of your projects and all of the servers you publish to along with the FTP user names and passwords. You can download it here:

http://herculessolutions.com/AspDotNetProjectFtp.aspx

It's completely free of course!

 

Looks like a great tool but without the source code no-one in their right mind would install a program that could leak there password and user information and essentially all there files.

 

Oh come on, every single day you put your password into plenty of different software applications or websites that don't provide the code to their system. All of those apps could do who knows what with your information. In addition, FTP is inherintly a clear text protocol which means anyone who wants to sniff any networks your password happens to go through on the way to DASP or your host can discover your password. The moral of the story is to back up all of your files that you're FTPing anywhere.

But you're right, installing any software on your computer comes down to trust in the company and safety in numbers, so buyer beware. I do think most people are honest and most companies aren't out to steal FTP credentials.

To back up that point, I did go ahead and throw up the source code for anyone who is interested in looking at it or would like to make modifications. If you do make any modifications, please keep us up to date.

Download the executable and the C# project here:

herculessolutions.com/AspDotNetProjectFtp.aspx

 

I didn't mean to come accross negatively, perhaps I should have should asked if the source was available. I only took a moment to glance at the page. I didn't see the source code link. You are right about those points. I just wasn't really thinking past the source code point. I will give it a try

 

Hi,


In reply to the original post: If you do develop your apps on your local system, there's one thing that will probably bite you at least once. I've only done a few uploads to the server, and twice I forgot to change references to files on my local machine. It's easy to miss these, beacuse if you use your local system to access the site when it's published (to test it out), your browser will look for the references and find them - because they are on your own machine - but no one else can! I found it helpful to do a project wide search for any part of a word containing "localhost" before publishing to the server. If you left a few of these in the project files, that should find them. You may not even intentionally write references that use the loacl host while developing with VS, but if you do some drag and drops, the full URL is what you'll get, rather than a relative path from your application root; which is what you want.


Even if you do use the VS copy project, you'll want at least a simple ftp program to check on things and clean up stuff you no longer want on the server.


Hope it helps. BRN..