Msdeploy --- Does it work or suck?

Question

I make frequent and small changes to my ASP.NET/C# application, so I need a mechanism to deploy these changes with the least problems on my server. I realized that msdeploy should have done the trick, but I find this completely unpleasant. After a week, I still can’t get it working (against EC2 server), and I believe that the error answers are next to useless. Does anyone really use this tool? Any alternatives that work ... less hard?

Answer 1

This may seem most obvious, but why not just use Visual Studio's built-in publishing feature. The VS2010 version has a new call to the web.config trasnsformations function, which allows you to configure various web.config files for dev, test and prod, or something else that you want to call a deployment. When I publish, I select an assembly type, such as Debug or Release, that selects the correct web.config, right-click the project and click publish. Select a server or ftp location and publish. It is very simple.

Am I missing something in your question?