Application Deployment in Visual Studio
Through deployment, you can get your application to the platforms on which it needs to run. This topic introduces how you can:
Set up a server as a deployment target.
Configure your deployment targets.
Generate and place project outputs.
Understand HTML tags updated during deployment.
Use deployment to distribute and debug Web applications.
Web Server Setup for Deployment
To deploy to another machine, a Web server, you may need to install additional software on the Web server. If the Web server is running Microsoft® Internet Information Server (IIS) or the Personal Web Server (PWS), you can deploy Web contents, controls, and applets with no further configuration work on that server.
If you want to deploy server-side components, however, you should confirm that the Web server has Microsoft® Posting Acceptor 2.0 installed from Microsoft® Visual Studio™ or Microsoft® Visual J++™. This enables the Microsoft development environment to deploy server-side components to that Web server.
To deploy Web content to a Web server, you need read/write access to the Web server. The administrator of the Web server can set more detailed control on access privileges and security settings.
Configure Your Deployment Targets
After your Web server is up, you can specify it in a URL given to a deployment target. The development environment will check the Web server to see if the server can handle server-side components or just Web contents, controls, and applets. You can create as many deployment targets as you like.
Generate and Place Project Outputs
Once your deployment targets are created, you can add project outputs or additional files. Project outputs are items generated by a build — such as the outputs of a Visual J++ applet project: the HTML pages and Java class files. Additional files are files copied to the deployment target URL — such as a Readme.txt file added to the deployment target for that configuration.
HTML Tags Updated During Deployment
The Microsoft development environment deployment feature performs all required updates to the deployed HTML referencing deployed Java classes so that changing the location of the file, through deployment, will not break the HTML link. The updated HTML is only the deployed HTML on the Web server, not the HTML code saved in your project.
Deployment for Distributing and Debugging Web Applications
You can create a deployment target that will deploy your application to the production Web server. Whenever you need to deploy the application into production you can select the Deploy command, and the development environment will deploy the application. Thus you can periodically redeploy your application as changes are made and tested.
You can debug the deployed application remotely, as the application responds to breakpoints set on your own computer.
For More Information For step-by-step instructions on performing tasks introduced in this topic, see the following topics.