Using Visual Studio 2008 to Deploy Your App to Windows Server 2008
I've got an app using features of .NET 3.5. I'm using Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 and deploying to Windows Server 2008 RC0. As you can tell... this post will be very dated as all the stuff I'm using are pre-release. So if you read this and we've gone RTM... these instructions probably won't apply.
One great thing about Visual Studio 2008 is that you can deploy your app directly to your IIS Server very easily and quickly. That's assuming your server has been configured and ready to go. Typically you administrator will do the configuration in prep for your app but incase you don't have one (like me)... these are the steps you take.
We assume the following:
- You have Windows Server 2008 installed (i'm using RC0)
- You have a .NET web app to deploy (mine uses features of .NET 3.5)
- You have admin rights on your server
Here are the high level steps:
- Enable Web and Application Server roles on Windows Server 2008
- Enable FrontPage Server Extensions (FPSE)
- I had to install FPSE seperately as it is currently in Beta
- Details and download here
- Enable FPSE on the IIS Web Site in question
- Use the "owdadm -o install" command or
- Use the FrontPage Server (also called Microsoft SharePoint) administration website to "extend" the site with FPSE (the site typically is on port 4425)
- Ensure the user you plan on using for deployment have proper rights
- User account has rights on the server and have NTFS rights to the filesystem where the app will go
- User account has rights in FPSE to do stuff (not sure the exact permission required but I used FULL rights)
- Ensure the target IIS Web Site allows Windows Authentication
That's it. Once this is done to the site, you'll be able to deploy easily in Visual Studio 2008 to your target server.
