Difference between Web Deployment Projects (.wdproj) and MSDeploy

Question

• What is the difference between Web Deployment Projects (.wdproj) and new MSDeploy?
• Is it prefer to use MSDeploy instead of Web Deployment Projects?
• Is this add-in created only for backward compatibility with already created Visual Studio 2005/2008 projects, or it's a product, which will be evolving?

Answer 1

1. Web Deployment Projects and Web Deploy (aka MSDeploy) are not mutually exclusive; you can use a WDP to create a Web Deploy deployment package. Web Deploy is an IIS tool that can be used by Visual Studio or MSBuild. In Visual Studio 2010 the Web Publishing Pipeline is implemented using MSBuild so that it can work the same way from the IDE (the one-click publish feature) or by invoking MSBuild targets from the command line. See this MSDN page:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd394698.aspx

2. If you're using VS 2010 or later and you are using web application projects rather than web site projects, you don't need Web Deployment Projects unless you want to build a precompile/merge step into deployment. If you're using web site projects, you still need to use Web Deployment Projects.

3. WDP's days are numbered, it will not be evolving.