Eric Wise

Business & .NET

Pretty Unhappy with Deployment

ASP .NET 2.0 deployment pretty much sucks. Just thought I'd share.

Why is there no option to compile everything into 1 assembly like in 1.1? In all honesty, my deployment times have probably increased five-fold.

Other than that I'm pretty happy with the new designer and controls. The IDE is good, I had very little difficulties migrating 1.1 apps to 2.0.

But the deployment... why? Are we being punished?

Published Nov 01 2005, 03:00 PM by Eric Wise

Comments

breichelt said:

I thought I had read that there was an option to compile everything into one assembly, but I'm blanking on where I saw that now......not really that helpful, I know :) I think Scott Guthrie might have talked about it on his blog, http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu

# November 1, 2005 3:30 PM

cathal said:

Microsoft are releasing a utility called aspnet_merge to provide this functionality. You can read some more about it @ http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Blogs/tabid/825/EntryID/195/Default.aspx

# November 1, 2005 3:45 PM

BTX said:

keep looking... look closer =o)

# November 1, 2005 5:32 PM

Dave Burke's Blog said:

A good one, from a blogger at the top of my Must-Read list: Mini-Microsoft.&nbsp;&nbsp; I thought he...

# November 5, 2005 12:18 PM

scottgu@microsoft.com said:

We are releasing something called "Visual Studio 2005 Web Deployment Projcts" later this week. It adds a number of deployment features to the VS 2005 IDE -- including the ability to deploy web-sites as a single assembly if you want.

It also provides support for conditional web.config configurations based on the VS build configuration (for example: you could have one set of connectionstring settings for debugging/development, and another for production builds).

It also provides deep integration with MSBuild, along with 20 or so new web tasks for MSBuild that you can use for more advanced deployment configurations.

I'll be blogging about it tomorrow or Tuesday at http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu and it will be on the web for free download sometime in a few days. I think you'll really like it.

Hope this helps,

Scott

# November 6, 2005 4:46 PM

Shadow said:

Wow, I really hope you're joking.

The "compile everything into one jumbled mess" made maintaining websites a complete nightmare. I'm glad they fixed it in the current release - now the code files are closely associated with the ASPX pages, where they belong. Releasing incremental updates to sites no longer requires weeks of planning.

You can still use compiled assemblies for your business logic - why on earth would you *ever* want to compile your codebehinds into a jumbled, unmaintainable assembly?

Most developers avoided doing ANY web work in Visual Studio because of that reason - I know meny people (myself included) who avoided ASP.NET because it was too much work hacking everything into notepad.

# November 8, 2005 1:13 AM

Eric Wise said:

Actually because our web applications are properly tiered the only thing the web pages ever do is call the middle tier which is a seperate assembly.

So the vast majority of pushes in our situation aren't .aspx pushes, we just tweaked out a call in the code behind which was nicely compiled into one assembly. This meant that I could just rebuild and push the web.dll

Since the new deployment model splits everything out and embeds freakishly named dll pointers in the .aspx files I now have to actually go through and do incremental pushes.

Depending on how your shop runs and what your challenges are impacts how you feel about this change. In Shadow's case one assembly is a pain in the ass. In my particular case breaking it up caused more work.

# November 17, 2005 10:02 AM

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