ASP.NET Deployment – new WDP for VS2008 released

Microsoft just released the Customer Technology Preview (CTP) of Web Deployment Projects for Visual Studio 2008. It contains all the features that VS 2005 WDP release has and in addition has few other enhancements.

For example it only deletes the existing web now if the build succeeds, this will pretend breaking running IIS Applications if you used to deploy directly into the specific IIS Application folder. Additionally you can automatically create virtual Folders in IIS or replace existing ones – this works for IIS6 and IIS7.

Also nice to know is, that aspnet_merge is being automatically installed now when you install Visual Studio 2008. It’s placed in “%Program Files%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\bin and of course WDP depends on it if you use the merge feature.

Get the December CTP 2007 here: VS 2008 WDP December CTP 2007.