Whether using VS 2005 or VS 2008, I highly recommend the free tool Unleash It for deployment. It deploys just the typ of files you configure and is ideal for packaging a set of compiled files for xcopy deployment on a server without unnecessarily including C# source code or solution and project files.
Be sure and do a Release Rebuild of the solution then open Unleash It and browse to the web folder under the solution for the source folder and browse to a destination folder of your choosing.
You can adjust the files that it includes in the deployment by clicking the little red check mark next to the dropdown that says Quick Deploy Profile.
In addition to the defaults, you need to add masks for
*.html
*.asmx
*.ashx
*.xml
*.xsl
*.master
*.skin
*.xsd
*.browser
*.skin
*.theme
*.png
*.ico
I alway deploy first to a local folder in order to do some additional cleanup before deploying to production. My cleanup steps are as follows:
- Open the Web.config file with a text editor and change near the bottom, change <compilation debug=true to false. This is for best performance on production servers.
- Look in Data folder and delete currentlog.config and test.config files, these will be re-created as needed so best not to deploy them.
- Look in Data/Sites/1 and delete test.config
- Look in Data/Sites/1/systemfiles and delete any files in there. These are temporary files that will be created on the server so they should not be deployed from your dev machine.
- Delete the obj folder under the root of the web
Now the files are ready to copy to the production server