Today, deploying a web application is not as easy as it should be. Whether you are deploying your web to a shared hosting environment and paying monthly to maintain it OR whether you have a web server/s managed by your enterprise, there are a lot of manual steps involved in getting your application from point A to point B.

If you are deploying your web application to a shared hoster then today you have to use technologies like FTP which take a long time to get your web content to the hosted server. After deploying your content you have to manually go to hoster control panel and install your database by running sql scripts and configure various IIS settings like marking a folder as an application to isolate it from the rest of the application.

If you are in an enterprise environment and you want to get a web application deployed you have to systematically document each step that your server admins and DBAs have to perform. In most circumstances you also have to ask your admins to modify the web.config files and go to IIS Manager and configure your settings apart from deploying your web content. Your DBA has to do the necessary steps of running the sql scripts in the right order to get your DB up and running. Such installations many a times take hours to complete.

With Visual Studio 2010 and IIS Web Deployment Tool (MsDeploy.exe / Web Deploy) we are introducing a set of technologies which can seamlessly deploy your applications taking care of the problems stated above. Microsoft Web Deployment Tool is a free download available on the web… You can download MSDeploy from below location:

http://blogs.iis.net/msdeploy/archive/2008/10/29/the-web-deployment-tool-beta-2-is-now-available.aspx

Do note that installing Visual Studio 2010 will automatically install MSDeploy for you. Visual Studio 2010 CTP can be downloaded from below location:

http://www.asp.net/vwd/

Web Deployment feature sets in VS 2010 can be broken down into following major areas:

1. Web Packaging - VS 2010 uses MSDeploy to create a .zip file for your application which we call as a web package. This file contains meta data + the below artifacts

· All of your IIS Settings (e.g. application pools, error pages etc)
· Web Content (e.g. .aspx, .ascx, .js, images etc)
· SQL Server DB
· Various other artifacts like Security Certs, GAC Components, Registry etc

A web package can then be taken to any server and installed either via IIS Manager UI Wizard or even via command line or API for automated deployment scenarios.

2. Web.Config Transformation – With VS 2010 web deployment we are introducing XML Document Transform (XDT) which will allow you to transform your development time web.config file to production/deployment time web.config file. The transformation is controlled by web.config TRANSFORM files named web.debug.config, web.release.config etc. The naming of these files is tied to the MSBuild configuration you are trying to deploy. The transform file will need just the changes that you really want to make to your deployed web.config… You can control the type of changes by instructing the XDT engine using simple and easy to understand syntax…

e.g. the below syntax in web.release.config will replace the connectionString section with new values in the web.config file which is produced for deployment of your release configuration.

3. DB Deployment – VS 2010 allows you to deploy your application along with all of its dependencies including database dependencies on SQL Server. Just by providing the connection string of your source database VS10 will automatically script its data/schema and package it for deployment. VS will also allow you to provide custom .sql scripts and also sequence them correctly to run on the server. Once your DB is packaged along with your IIS Settings and web content you can choose to deploy it to any server by providing the connection string at the install time.

4. 1-Click Publish - VS 2010 will allow you to not only package your web applications with all of its dependencies but also use IIS remote management service to publish the application to remote server. VS 10 will now allow you to create a publish profile of your hoster account or of various testing servers and save your credentials securely so that going forward you can deploy to any of these publish profiles with just one click using Web One Click toolbar. With VS 10 you will also be able to publish using MsBuild command line so that you can configure your team build environment to include publishing in continuous integration model

If you use Visual Studio to open a Web project that was developed for the .NET Framework 2.0, the .NET Framework 3.0, or the .NET Framework 3.5, Visual Studio can automatically perform all the changes to Web.config files that are required to be able to run using .NET Framework version 4. If the project is a local IIS project and you are using IIS 7.0, Visual Studio can also reassign the application to an application pool that is associated with the .NET Framework version 4

It is recommended that you use Visual Studio to perform the tasks that are required in order to upgrade. If you do not use Visual Studio to perform the upgrade automatically, you must manually edit the Web.config file and must manually associate the application in IIS with the .NET Framework version 4

Typically the procedures covered in this topic are sufficient for upgrading a Web application, because later versions of the .NET Framework are designed to be backward compatible with earlier versions. However, you should also look in the readme documentation for breaking changes. The behavior of a component that was developed for an earlier version of the .NET Framework might have changed in the newer version of the .NET Framework

Note:
Do not upgrade an IIS application if it has nested applications within it that target earlier versions of the .NET Framework. If an IIS application that targets the .NET Framework 3.5 or earlier is nested within an IIS application that targets the .NET Framework 4, the compiler might report errors when it compiles the nested application. This is because Web.config files inherit settings from files that are higher in the configuration file hierarchy. The .NET Framework 4 is backward compatible; therefore, a nested Web application that targets the .NET Framework 4 can inherit settings from Web.config files that are for earlier versions. But earlier versions of the .NET Framework are not forward compatible; therefore, they cannot inherit settings from a .NET Framework 4 Web.config file.

1. Open the Web site or project in Visual Studio.

2. If a Visual Studio Conversion Wizard welcome dialog box appears, click Next. This wizard appears when you open a Web Application Project or a solution. It does not appear when you open a Web Site project that is not in a solution

3. If you are converting a project, in the Visual Studio Conversion Wizard, select backup options and click Next in the Choose Whether to Create a Backup dialog box

Visual Studio upgrades your project file to the Visual Studio 2010 format. If you are upgrading a solution instead of an individual project, Visual Studio upgrades the solution file to the Visual Studio 2010 format

4. If you are converting a project, in the Visual Studio Conversion Wizard, click Next in the Ready to Convert dialog box

5. If you are opening the Web project on a computer that does not have the .NET Framework 3.5 installed, in the Project Target Framework Not Installed dialog box, select Retarget the project to .NET Framework 4 and click OK

6. If you are opening the Web project on a computer that does have the .NET Framework 3.5 installed, in the Web Site targeting older .NET Framework Found dialog box, clear the check box if you do not want to upgrade all Web sites or projects in a solution

7. In the dialog box, click Yes

Visual Studio updates the Web.config file. The changes that are made to the Web.config file are listed in the procedure later in this topic that explains how to update the Web.config file manually. Visual Studio does not update comments. Therefore, after the conversion, the Web.config file might contain comments that reference earlier versions of the .NET Framework

Visual Studio automatically sets the controlRenderingCompatibilityVersion attribute of the pages element to 3.5. You can remove this setting in order to take advantage of XHTML and accessibility improvements in ASP.NET 4. For more information, see the procedure later in this topic that explains how to update the Web.config file manually

8. If you are converting a project, in the Visual Studio Conversion Wizard, click Close in the Conversion Complete dialog box.

9. If the project is not a local IIS project, associate its IIS application with the Visual Studio when it is deployed to IIS. For more information, see the procedure later in this topic that corresponds to the version of IIS that you are using

If the IIS application is associated with the .NET Framework 2.0, the site will not work. ASP.NET will generate errors that indicate that the targetFramework attribute is unrecognized.

10. If the project is a local IIS project and the IIS version is 6.0, associate its IIS application with the Visual Studio by following the procedure later in this topic for IIS 6.0

If the project is a local IIS project, Visual Studio automatically performs this association. It assigns the application to the first available application pool for the .NET Framework version 4. If no application pool exists, Visual Studio creates one

Note: By default, the IIS 6.0 Metabase API that Visual Studio uses to assign and create application pools is not available in Windows Vista or Windows 7. To make it available, enable IIS 6 Metabase Compatibility Layer in the Windows Control Panel by selecting Programs and Features and Turn Windows Features On or Off. The following illustration shows the Windows Features dialog box

11. If the project includes code that accesses the HttpBrowserCapabilities object (in the HttpRequest.Browser property), test the code to make sure that it works as expected

The browser definition files that provide information to the HttpBrowserCapabilities object were changed in ASP.NET 4, and the changes are not backward compatible with earlier versions of ASP.NET. If you discover a problem and prefer not to change your code to accommodate the ASP.NET 4 changes, you can copy the ASP.NET 3.5 browser definition files from the ASP.NET 3.5 Browsers folder of a computer that has ASP.NET 3.5 installed to the ASP.NET 4 Browsers folder. The Browsers folder for a version of ASP.NET can be found in the following location:

%SystemRoot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\versionNumber\Config\Browsers

After you copy the browser definition files, you must run the aspnet_regbrowsers.exe tool. For more information, see ASP.NET Web Server Controls and Browser Capabilities.

For those of you who just upgraded your site to the latest ASP.NET 4.0 Framework, you may sometimes see this error message: “A potentially dangerous Request.QueryString value was detected from the client”.

The request validation feature in ASP.NET provides a certain level of default protection against cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. In previous versions of ASP.NET, request validation was enabled by default. However, it applied only to ASP.NET and only when those pages were executing.

In ASP.NET 4, by default, request validation is enabled for all requests, because it is enabled before the BeginRequest phase of an HTTP request. As a result, request validation applies to requests for all ASP.NET resources, not just .aspx page requests. This includes requests such as Web service calls and custom HTTP handlers. Request validation is also active when custom HTTP modules are reading the contents of an HTTP request.

As a result, request validation errors might now occur for requests that previously did not trigger errors. To revert to the behavior of the ASP.NET 2.0 request validation feature, add the following setting in the Web.Config  file:

<httpRuntime requestValidationMode="2.0" />

However, we recommend that you analyze any request validation errors to determine whether existing handlers, modules, or other custom code accesses potentially unsafe HTTP inputs that could be XSS attack vectors.

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