I have a web site build with vs 2005 on a remote server using Frontpage extensions. I know I can use the publish option to compile this and push it to a production server. the problem is that publish deletes everything from the destination and when you have a lot of images and other files in the application it takes forever to publish. Is there any other alternative to Publish? (please don't suggest web deployment project as this can not be used with Frontpage extensions).  Can I force Vs to compile the existing site ( I don't want the .vb files on the production server) and then let me do an xcopy or something similiar?

thanks,

Kevin

I have the same problem, I'm guessing your needs are similar to mine in that you need to save small changes and view the changes instantly, and only publish when you want to?

I think I may have found a solution, but haven't yet implemented it yet (bear with me).  It basically involves hosting your website twice on your production server.  Something along the lines of mySite_Dev and mySite_Live.  mySite_Dev will point to an area on your file system containing your project and source files and mySite_Live will point to your published files.  So for development you would make changes to http://mySite_Dev and once you were happy publish the files and view them at http://mySite_Live

Hope this makes sense!

That's more or less what I want with one exception - I was hoping to avoid the publish completely. What publish does (far as I can tell) is first delete your mysite Live contents , then copy from the remote mysite dev to your local system (where vs 2005) is, compile  and then send them back to the ms live on the remote server again -  It takes forever with my application (hours).

 What I am looking at is using msbuild on the remote system. I make all the changes on the dev, test , debug etc then xcopy from dev to a staging area (not quite live) and then do an msbuild to build all the .vb files into a single dll. Once that is done I can xcopy from the staging to the live site. My only problem is that I don't know if this will work and also I have never used msbuild before.

I haven't used msbuild either.  How long does your compile build take on it's own? ie, if you just do Ctrl + Shift + B in Visual Studio, does that still take a long time?  If I need to view quick build changes on the mySite_Dev without publishing I save all pages then use the shortcut to do a quick build.  I suppose it depends on how big your application is though.  What I'm thinking is that if you can shortcut compile on your dev area first then use xcopy to copy only your 'live' files (aspx, bin folder etc) to your staging area and then subsequently live.  Or if you want to be really clever, instead of xcopy, execute a WScript to loop through your source files and copy only recently modified files over? This would ensure that all your images etc don't get copied over all the time.

The compile itself is not the problem. That only takes a couple of minutes. Its the publish that kills it. We have a lot of images in the application and publish deletes and re-copies these over during the publish process and its this that takes hours.

I'll contine on with msbuild and see if I can get a solution working.

thanks,

Kevin

Ok I have it!  Should have used aspnet_compiler instead of msbuild. What you need to do is log onto your remote system and run the following (I stuck it into a .bat file).

C:/winnt/microsoft.net/framework/v2.0.50727/aspnet_compiler.exe -p c:\source web site  -v /cstemp -u c:\target web site

 where the source web site is your development (mysite dev) and target is your live or staging site. The -v switch is a temporary dir that it will use (and create and delete) and the -u means only compile the code files but leave the markup files in place - this is like vs2003 where you had a single dll in the /bin directory, .aspx file but no source.

After I run this I use xcopy to refresh the my production server from the staging area (target web site). Now I can edit remotely, save and run and then one bat file to build and copy.

 -Kevin 

Hey nice one, that's good to know - never used the command-line compile utility before but it looks like it has it's advantages.  Cheers.