"Visual Studio 2005 Web Deployment Projects"

Visual Studio 2005 Web Deployment Projects

"Visual Studio 2005 Web Deployment Projects provide additional functionality for building and deploying Web site applications that you create in ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005. This add-in includes a new tool that enables you to merge the assemblies created during ASP.NET 2.0 precompilation, and it provides a comprehensive UI within Visual Studio 2005 for managing build configurations, merging, and pre-build and post-build task using MSBuild.

Overview
A Web Deployment Project creates and maintains an MSBuild project file, and is associated in a solution with a Web site project. A Web Deployment Project enables you to manage not only build configuration and merge options, but other tasks such as specifying changes for the application's Web.config file during compilation, changing connection strings, creating virtual directories, and performing other tasks at specific points in the deployment process.

The new assembly merge tool (Aspnet_merge.exe) combines assemblies created during ASP.NET 2.0 precompilation for deployment. The tool supports many merge options, from combining assemblies for each Web site folder to creating a single assembly for the entire Web site.

More information about the new merge tool and about Visual Studio 2005 Web Deployment Projects is available in the following article:

Using Web Deployment Projects with Visual Studio 2005. This article describes the Visual Studio 2005 Web Deployment Project add-in and how to create and manage Web Deployment Projects.

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Interesting... Sounds like ASPNET_Merge.exe is something like ILMerge.

I'm not doing much ASP/ASP.Net development right now, but when that changes I bet this would be useful.


Related Past Post XRef:
ILMerge Updated
The Code Project - Merging .NET assemblies using ILMerge - .NET

(via Mikhail Arkhipov (MSFT)'s WebLog - Web deployment projects are live)