How to copy a website from one computer to another? - asp.net

I have a website which was created using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.
I want to copy the website onto a CD so that my professor can run it on his computer.
However, since Visual Studio creates the solution of the website in My Documents/Visual Studio 2010/Projects, I cannot simply copy the website folder only.
What is the best way to transfer a copy of this website please? Thank you and all the best for the new year.

Of course you can copy the folder. It will make the website in a folder within projects and you will be able to copy this folder onto a CD. When you run the website you can see where it is stored, if you look into the address bar of your web browser it will say something like c:\Users\You\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\MyWebsite\index.html. In this case the folder you need to copy is c:\Users\You\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\MyWebsite\ - instruct your professor to open the folder and select index.html.
The question is, have you used something other than just HTML and CSS to do this? Its probably a stupid question as if you have used ASP or similar to create the website you would probably also have the knowledge to copy said website. In the off chance that you HAVE used ASP or similar you will need to put this website onto a server that runs ASP.
However, if you've just used Visual Studio to lay out the website and put in some content and such, then its most likely all the files are images, HTML and CSS which will happily run off a CD.

If your professor needs only to run it on his environment, you can use "Publish" feature of Visual Studio 2010 and choose the file system as the target.
Then burn the published folder.
He then will be able to copy it from the CD to his Microsoft.NET enabled application server and run it.

You have to search My Documents/Visual Studio 2010/WebSites/
And obviosly, u should find there the website of your solution. It is needed to copy the website folder and solution folder of your site from VS2010/Projects and /Websites folders to your professors' computer.
This way is right if your professor has VS 2010 installed.

Upload it to a cheap or free hosting provider and send the URL to your professor. If necessary, you can password-protect the site to prevent access by unauthorized third parties.

Related

How to use Downloaded Bootstrap Template

So I am new to ASP.NET and have run through some tutorials. The next step for me was to find a really cool bootstrap template to employ. I downloaded this solution http://bootstraptaste.com/bocor-bootstrap-template-nice-animation/ and tried to change the .css file as I did originally following the Visual Studio tutorial http://www.asp.net/visual-studio/overview/2013/creating-web-projects-in-visual-studio#bootstrap .
Nothing happened. Also, a ton of files came with the template I downloaded, including an index.html file which actually loads the project into Internet Explorer.
I'd like to load this solution in Visual Studio so I can play around with it and modify it. Is this possible? I am definitely not advanced enough yet to get the same results on my own. Any advice and help is appreciated!
I'm not sure if Visual Studio is the best tool for creating your websites. To get your template running, execute the file index.html in a web browser. It is however, a better practice to run your templates from a server like xampp, wamp or IIS (in case of Windows OS).
In case of xampp, copy the folder to xampp/htdocs/. Then start the xampp server and based upon the port your xampp server is running on, run it on a web browser by typing localhost:port/folder_name in the address bar.
The procedure is similar for wamp with the only difference being in the path. The path for wamp will be wamp/sites/

Deploying a Visual Studio website vs web application

So I'm using visual studio 2010 to build a website that was formerly running on PHP, so I'm pretty new to the environment.
In starting the project I built a website project, not a web application project. I know that will probably generate a lot of "never use a website project, use a web application project instead" comments, but bear with me.
I'm attempting to provide our server team with the necessary files to compile on our server for the first time. However they're used to working with web application files, not website files.
Normally they are given the source code and a batch file that compiles the code into deployment directories and then they just move the files to the server from there. I'm pretty sure that the other teams use deployment packages to do this, which obviously isn't an option for a website.
My question is, what would be the equivalent steps for getting the source for a website ready to deploy vs a web application? I have published the website to a separate folder and this has rendered what I think is the equivalent in many ways, but I wanted to make sure.
Also, is it possible to publish certain parts of a website without others?
Please with-hold all the comments about how I should be using a web application instead, google seems to assume that's all that's used out there too.
Thanks!
There isn't much to deploying a web site other than copying the source files to a directory in IIS. It will compile the site automatically on the first page request.
I agree with Britton. I personally prefer web application but with the web site project you have 2 options.
Either a) Upload all the files (including the .vb or .cs files) and the web server will compile on the fly. OR, you can publish to a separate folder locally on your machine, and then upload that folder. I would do the publish if you don't want anyone seeing your source code.

Opening Visual Studio Solution from Server Explorer

I don't know if this is possible, but I am trying to open a Visual Studio 2010 solution that is on a remote server from in Visual Studio. The project I am on is using Kentico CMS and we would like to be able to sync changes made to the hosted site (on the server) using TFS and Visual Studio as well as changes made via the Kentico CMS Desk portal. I haven't found anything on the Visual Studio or Kentico dev site or in the documentation. Whether or not this is possible, or if there is a better way of achieving this goal, I would appreciate any insight you could give.
I believe this system would help you accomplish syncing your development environment to a remote server.
http://www.kentico.com/Product/All-Features/Other-Modules/Staging-and-synchronization
You can check out what gets synced on this page:
http://devnet.kentico.com/docs/devguide/index.html
The content staging is good for synchronizing changes made via the user interface.
For synchronizing changes in the file system (e.g. changes in the code files in Visual studio), you can use some third party tools to keep the folders up to date - i.e. Drop box or Google drive (but there are also other tools and utilities).
After talking with a couple developers who were a bit more familiar with Kentico, we eventually found a good solution to our problem. It's not perfect, but it will work for our purposes.
We had the Kentico administrator generate a new license code for Kentico for 'localhost'.
In Visual Studio, we pulled down one of the default Kentico projects from the server.
On the project properties, we set Use Dynamic Ports to false and chose a number to set the ports to.
Once the project was built and running, we could navigate to 'localhost:1501/[ProjectName]/[PageName (CMSDesk, Landing.aspx, etc.)]' to access the CMS Desk portal.
In the CMS Site Manager, navigate to Sites > (click the Edit button for the site) > Domain Aliases > New Domain Alias and set a new domain alias (the website you want to use when viewing the site (for us it was dev.[projectname].com). This allows other developers to log onto and use the pages via the domain alias when the project is on the server. Changes made on the localhost copy must be pushed to the server before they are visible.
Using the local copy, we could work with the web parts and sync changes to TFS. We still have to manually copy the project from our local machine to the server in order to deploy, but we are hoping to set up a build machine that will push the TFS build to the server on a regular basis, which shouldn't be especially difficult.
If we find any better way to achieve this goal, or find any potential problems, I will be sure to update.

how do i connect my asp.net

Another beginner question for ASP.NET:
I'm starting an ASP.NET project in Visual Studio 2008, and would like to link it to a folder on a remote server (as in it builds/publishes to this folder). It may be my phrasing, but I cannot seem to figure out how to do this (even with Google at my side!).
I naively tried to just upload the code files to the server, but running my code produces errors related to the fact that the pages are not set up as an application.
Any help would be appreciated (or a link to a resource where i could learn more about this basic asp.net/vs08 stuff I keep running into).
On your web server the folder you copied your files into needs to be set up as an application or a virtual directory. This is done through the Internet Information Service panel found in the "Administrative Tools" off the Control Panel.
Depending what flavor of IIS you are using the procedure may differ.
Visual Studio 2008 has a publish feature. If you right-click on the web project there is a "Publish" option. You can then select where you want to Publish your files.
2 fast answers:
You can use the Publish option in Visual Studio and create a folder inside wwwroot to publish
Alternatively, you can create a simple setup program. Just add a new "web setup project" to the solution and add the results of the web site to the setup project.
And of course, have you tried googling asp.net deployment to get some help?
Good luck! :)
You will love Visual Studio 2010, which should be out in early 2010, if it follows previous versions. This would also mean an MSDN release a few months earlier. Why? Better deploy story.
As for where we are today, you can publish and have a directory created. You will have to publish to IIS instead of a directory to accomplish this. This means you have to have permissions to add a web app and publish to it.
For a directory, you will have to create the app in the IIS Manager. If you do not have access, try the IIS admin. If you cannot get them to do it, you are back to publish.

How can I use the "Publish" function in Visual Studio 2008 without erasing the contents of the target folder?

When I use Build->Publish Web Site in Visual Studio 2008, most of the time it compiles the site, and then simply asks me "All files in the target folder will be deleted. Continue?" (or something to that effect). On occasion, however, when publishing a project in Visual Studio, I would get a dialog box that would give me the choice of replacing the folder's contents completely, or simply replacing changed files with newer version.
I much prefer to publish without completely obliterating the folder, because the deployed application creates user files and cache files as it's been used that I don't want to take extra steps to preserve. However, I'm not sure why Visual Studio doesn't always give me this option. Is this a setting somewhere I can change? Is it tied to the version of .NET I'm using?
Any insight is appreciated!
Edit - Followup on 2009-01-20
I still haven't figured this out, but here's some more information.
Here's what the publish function looks like for one ASP.NET project on my Win XP desktop:
And here's what it looks like for a different project on my Vista laptop:
Notice the radio buttons in the second screenshot that allow me to choose to either delete the contents of the folder prior to publishing, or merely to overwrite matching files. I'd like to have these options for every project.
Both computers are running Visual Studio 2008 Professional (version 9.0.30729.1 SP, according to Help->About). The exact same version. And I doubt the OS difference is causing this functionality change. It's got to be a setting somewhere, right? Does anyone know?
John is right, the only difference is one of your projects is a Web Site Project and the other is a Web Application project. You will not see the "convert to web application" option unless you are in a Web Application project. I know... it is very misleading. The reason behind this stems from the the way you convert to a web application project. If you plan on converting it(which can be a real pain in arse, depending on how it is set up) then you need to be aware of a few differences:
In a Web Application project everything is pre-compiled all the codebehind pages will be compiled into a .dll ---- In a Web Site Project nothing in the project is pre-compiled, the compiler will compile everything to ensure it is valid but none of the compiled pages are uploaded. When a user first attempts to access the site each page is compiled into its own dll. This means in a Web Site Project you are able to upload a single codebehind file.
Namespaces - In a Web Application project namespaces are created by default in a Web Site Project they are not. So you may have to spend some time adding them if you plan on converting them.
Project files - you will notice that A Website Project does not have a "cproj" file a Web Application project does.
I have converted a few of these project I find they go fairly smooth as long as there is not a lot of code in the "app_code" folder. You can give it a try and see how easy it is, if it looks like it is going to be a pain, I would suggest FileZilla just FTP it and save yourself some headache.
Good Luck
That dialog is different for Web site projects and Web application projects. In my MVC projects (Web application projects), I see the additional options. In my regular ol' web site projects, I see the first dialog posted.
Not sure if this option will be suitable for you but you could use the copy website function from the solution explorer. Click on the "Copy Website" icon at the top of the solution explorer.
I think the real answer to your question is that you should put your user files and cache files somewhere else.
When publishing a web site Visual Studio is designed to make sure that the target folder contains your web site files, and absolutely nothing else.
Apparently this feature is coming in VS2010 - that's what Vishal Joshi announced at TechEd EMEA in session "PDC307: Microsoft Visual Studio 10: Web Development Futures"
The site has been updated from the site in the updated layer.

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