Publish: Do not copy files in folder App_Data

Question

My ASP.Net Application has been developped several years ago with Visual Studio Express 2013 for Web. Now I edited it with Visual Studio 2022 and published it using the Publish... command. Here I checked the "Do not copy AppData folder" option.

I realized that the folder App_Data now obviously has been renamed to AppData (without underscore). Does this meen that all content of my App_Data folder will be copied? Do I have to rename folder App_Data to AppData?

Answer 1

Hi @Bernd Morgeneyer, 

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A! 

Where did you check the "Do not copy AppData folder" option? 

I created a ASP.NET application and only found an option “Exclude files from the App_Data folder” on Publish Settings.

If I checked the option “Exclude files from the App_Data folder”, the Visual Studio will not copy the App_Data folder when publishing. 

If I renamed the App_Data into AppData and check the option “Exclude files from the App_Data folder”, VS will copy the AppData folder into the target location like the following.

To avoid confusion, I don’t recommend you rename the App_Data folder to AppData.

If the App_Data folder has already been renamed to AppData, you can try to manually rename the folder back to App_Data.

Besides, you can create a new ASP.NET application in VS2022 and consider migrating the code into a new project. 

Sincerely,

Anna

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