I am new to the Visual Studio 2013 IDE / Environment...
I have inherited an older (ASP.NET) web site that is currently being maintained using Microsoft Expression Web 4 (which is no longer supported by Microsoft). The test and production web sites are hosted remotely using IIS 7.5
I have a few questions with regard to migrating from Expression Web 4 to Visual Studio 2013:
1. Is there any way to simply copy (FTP/download) the web site from the production server into Visual Studio 2013? i.e.: create a new empty web site in VS 2013 and then copy everything from the production web site. Will this retain “sub-web” folders, etc.? (I doubt it).
2. When using Expression Web 4 to publish pages to IIS – some of the files in Expression Web are marked as “Exclude from Publishing” (because some files like web.config differ depending if publishing to the test or production server). I have not found anything in VS 2013 for an ASP.NET web site project that allows me to set individual files so they are excluded from being copied to a remote web site. Does such functionality even exist? Any insights would be appreciated.
Also, is Visual Studio Express 2013 for Web (http://www.asp.net/vwd) an add-in or a separate product from Visual Studio 2013 Professional?? I currently have Visual Studio 2013 Professional, but do I need Visual Studio Express for Web to maintain this web site? It is unclear to me if this is a separate product or an add-on to VS Studio -- can someone clarify?
Thanks in Advance