A lot of developers still use external FTP clients or even copy/paste to deploy their ASP.NET or Silverlight web project on the production server. It’s good to know Visual Studio can do this job for you. Just right-click your Web application project in the solution explorer and select the Publish… menu-item.

Publish… will pre-build your project and copy the necessary files to the destination server in one go. In Visual Studio 2010 it’s now possible to save your publishing options using a profile.

The profile will be saved as a XML file in the root directory of your web application. The name of the file follows the format [ProjectName].Publish.XML. And no panic, the password will be saved encrypted. If you are still using Visual Studio 2008, you don’t have this profile feature and you’ll have to fill in your credentials manually during each deployment action.

For more complex deployment scenarios, including database deployment, altering IIS settings etc.. you should take a look into the new webpackage deployment option in VS2010. For more infomation on this subject take a look here.