Beginning Web Development, Silverlight, and ASP.NET AJAX

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CHAPTER 6 ■ DEPLOYING YOUR WEB SITE
Deploying Your Service Tier
The best way to deploy your application is to use the IDE to deploy it directly to the
server. Visual Studio will perform most if not all of the IIS administration for you if you do.
Before deploying, though, you should once again edit your Web.config file. You’ll see
that in the default Web.config, this section is commented out. You should remove the
comments:
These lines configure how your ASP.NET application will deal with specific errors.
In this case, if the user attempts to access something on your web site they shouldn’t,
ASP.NET (and IIS) will display a “You don’t have access to that resource” error page. If
the resource simply isn’t found, it will display a “File not found” error page. These pages
come as part of ASP.NET, but feel free to provide your own. Just replace the page file
names you see here with the page file names of the pages you create, and ASP.NET will
use your pages. You can add other error pages as well, following the same model. Just add
the HTTP error code in the statusCode attribute and the page file name in the redirect
attribute, as shown here.
Note also that you should ensure that the setting in Web.config is set to
turn off debugging, like this:
Once the Web.config file is ready, you then use the Copy Web Site tool on the Web
Sites menu to access the deployment tool (see Figure 6-18).
At the top of the screen, you’ll see a Connect button. Click this to specify the server
that you want to connect to. One helpful feature is that if you specify an IIS server and a
URL containing a subdirectory, IIS will automatically create the virtual web directory for
you. So for example, if you want to deploy the web service to a virtual web directory
called ServiceTier, you simply add it to the URL of the server you want to open and then
click New Web Site (see Figure 6-19).