What is the difference between publishing through Ms Build and Visual Studio Publish Wizard through the IDE?

Question

I searched on the web and could not find a satisfying answer for this question below:

I am currently working on ms build to publish my winform application based on the environment selected (Dev or Prod). I am using Ms Build Community Task and referencing this article to achieve this purpose.

I had a few theoretical doubts based on publishing application.

1) Is there any difference in publishing through the visual studio ide and msbuild?

2) What do most developers prefer to use and why?

3) What are the advantages of using MsBuild to publish an application as compared to publishing through the visual studio IDE?

4) What is faster??

5) Why is it said that one step build is good to maintain and debug applications?

I am using a .net 3.5 winform application developed in Csharp and my question is pertaining to clickonce windows applications only. Please help me clear these doubts. Any views appreciated.

Answer 1

If you use msbuild, you can write scripts to run msbuild and mage and package up and copy the deployment to the webserver or file share where you are hosting your application. Creating the scripts is a p.i.t.a. (in my opinion), but you only have to do it once. You have fewer issues of having any kind of manual errors with your builds/deployments.

You have to use mage to create the manifests, and there are a handful of options that you can not set with mage, such as minimum version (a showstopper for some).

I have no idea what most people use. I designed my company's deployment, and we use Visual Studio, mostly because I never got around to writing scripts, and we have a build engineer who likes to build from Visual Studio. It gives us a little more control because we can change anything without having to mess with the scripts, but we rarely do except for switching between production, staging, and development. I think if you wanted to publish to production versus staging, you would just have additional scripts for that.

I doubt either is faster.

I think it depends on whether you know msbuild and have time to mess around with it, and whether you have any properties you want set in the manifests that mage won't set.