IIS/Visual Studio Publish Profiles

Question

I know IIS allows the creation of Publish Profiles that can be "imported" into Visual Studio in order to upload a site directly into IIS (since I'm already using it). But now I have a more specific question regarding the use of these publish profiles in Visual Studio.

I have a solution for a web application that comprises a couple different components that I'd like to keep sepparated in IIS.
Namely, I have the web version, a mobile version and a couple webservices in this project.

What I'm configuring the server to do is have the webservices, mobile and website separated into different sites and use different publish profiles to publish them, each into it's own place.

Since I have all of these components into a single visual studio project, would it be possible to have publish profiles that publish a single component of the project without requiring me to do a "full publish"?

Or is the only solution to have separate projects? (even if they are all in one single VS Solution)

Answer 1

Visual Studio's web publishing feature assumes that projects map to atomic components¹. There isn't a way by default to specify how to only publish a subset of the project. Partly this stems from the build system (MSBuild) that the Web Publish Pipeline (WPP) is built over.

Options you can investigate:

• Make your site contents match the structure in your project. Deployments are incremental (if coming from your machine), and you can deploy specific files or folders from the VS Solution Explorer. If you need to republish your binaries, you're still stuck doing a full publish. Publishing individual files/directories is the exception to note ¹ above, and only works for content file changes.
• If you're up to the challenge, you could dig your way through the WPP targets (it's all MSBuild), and try to find a way to restrict which files are published. Then you could set up separate publish profiles within your project that each only handle a subset of the files.
• The easiest way, especially if you're automating this, is probably just to use separate projects for each component. :(