I'm thinking this should be really easy. But somehow I've screwed something
up. Rather than recount my problems (which I described in an earlier post),
I would appreciate your comments on my thinking here. I'm thinking that I'm
missing something [hopefully] obvious:

My objective is to take an ASP.NET 3.5 Web app and then deploy multiple
copies of it on a single Web server (IIS6). The idea is that I put a
different "face"on it for each of my customers (i.e.., exact same ASP.NET
web app, but with custom graphics and css per customer; with one copy of the
ASP.NET app per Web site). I already did this with an ASP.NET 1.1 app and it
works beautifully. Happy customers year after year, etc Now I want to do it
with a new ASP.NET 3.5 app.

I have developed and tested the ASP.NET Web app in VS2008 Pro and IIS 5.1 as
the development web server. Now I want to create a local copy for testing
purposes on my XP Pro/IIS 5.1 development PC - and I want for this local
copy to run *outside* of Visual Studio.

So here is what I think I need to do (please comment on these specific step
if I'm missing something or have something wrong):

1. create the supporting NTFS folder structure, giving permissions (say,
Full Control, just to remove any doubt) to the ASPNET account.

2. create a new IIS Web site on the local machine, that uses the newly
created NTFS directories for the new/test Web site. This includes creating
all requisite virtual directories in IIS with the requisite permissions, and
the root folder being set as an application.

3. Copy the ASP.NET DLLs, aspx, ascx, etc from the VS project folders to the
NTFS folders created in step 1 above.

That is all I ever did for the 1.1 version of the system and it worked
great. But with this new 3.5 version I'm having problems. Again, rather than
talking about the problems (enumerated in an earlier post), can you verify
that the above 3 steps are all that I *should* need to do (to create a
separate copy of the Web site that runs *outside* of Visual Studio).

I did receive some advice to Publish the Web site at step 3 above, rather
than manually copying the files. Is Publishing *required* in the post .NET
1.1 world? Or, should I be able to manually copy everything over to the
other non-VS Web site?

Thanks.

You should check out Web Deployment Projects at
http://blogs.msdn.com/webdevtools/ar...jects-wdp.aspx,
and the Web Deployment Tool (MSDEPLOY) at
http://blogs.iis.net/msdeploy/archiv...-released.aspx
and http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/346/m...ployment-tool/,
though the latter may require IIS6.
--
John Saunders | MVP - Connected System Developer