Friday, January 25, 2008

Visual Studio 2008 Web Deployment Projects (WDP) Releases to Web

Just some time ago I made an announcement on our team blog about release of WDP 2008... It has been a very exciting journey to reach at this point...

We had received an enormous participation for December 2007 CTP and community had provided us with a lot of interesting feedback... We had to balance out between features and timeline as usual... There are many customers who were not able to move ahead with Visual Studio 2008 installations because of unavailability of WDP 2008 and we did not hold so many folks from using VS 2008 hence releasing early was definitely important...

That said, I think the current version of WDP 2008 is a fine balance of speed to market and features... In fact I think this release has quite a few value added features:

  • New Features of Visual Studio 2008 Web Deployment Projects are as below... You can read in detail about these features on the post which announced December 2007 CTP of VS 2008 WDP (Click here to go to the December 2007 CTP post)
    • Migration from WDP for VS 2005 to WDP for VS 2008
    • Replacing WDP output only if Pre-Compilation succeeds
    • Creating IIS Applications
    • Using aspnet_merge.exe version which is installed with Visual Studio 2008
  • Core WDP Features

To find out more about the release visit the link below:

http://blogs.msdn.com/webdevtools/archive/2008/01/25/announcing-rtw-of-visual-studio-2008-web-deployment-projects-wdp.aspx

At the end I feel really proud to to call out the efforts of the heros behind WDP, my team members... Alison Lu has done a great job of testing WDP and reproducing every possible scenario that we heard from blogs, forums or connect system... Wendy Wei our dev on WDP got to the bottom of multiple issues that were raised... Bill Hiebert is our Architect and is always the support mechanism of the team... Anna Lidman is our Release Manager and makes our release process so smooth that we practically have forgotten the pains of going to the web... Tim McBride is our Dev lead and John Dundon is our test lead on WDP and have always been great partners to work with...

I hope you enjoy this release of WDP as much as we have enjoyed releasing it and hope it makes your pre-compilation and deployment challenges easier to deal with...

Happy Deploying!!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

nice post

Anonymous said...

Very interesting read, thank you for sharing this very informative article with us. Web Design

Viswanathan said...

Hi Vishal,
VS 2008 WDP Project settings do not allow us to change teh output platform to x64. I am trying to add a WDP proj for a web service who's output type is x64. The web service in-turn refers to a x64 built class library.
Since i am unable to set WDP project output as "x64" I am unable to build the WDP. I get a build error "Could not load file or assembly 'MyAssembly' or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format."
Is there a work-around to this problem by editing the wdproj file? Else please let me know a possible solution to this problem.

Vishal R Joshi said...

Hi Vishwa,
Please check out the forum discussion at http://forums.asp.net/t/1386237.aspx; this should give you the resolution to you issue...
-Vishal

forum widget said...

Hi! I'm really grateful for your recommendations and insights on Visual studio, I enjoy this new release - it is really good! it's also have less bugs and errors and the forum you mentioned helps a lot with fixing them...