Recently, I inherited an ASP.NET website that is being maintained using Expression Web 4 (which is no longer supported). The source code files (*.aspx, *.html, *.css, *.js) are uploaded via FTP within Expression Web to a remote server running IIS.
I was shocked to find out that Visual Studio 2013 website (NOT application) projects are missing two very important features that were present in Expression Web 4, namely:
1. The ability to mark certain files as “Exclude from publishing” – My suggestion is to include this feature in VS for website projects so that we can still have source files in the project but exclude them from being copied (FTP’d) to a remote server; typical cases are differences in web.config from test to production servers, etc. Does anything like this exist in VS?
2. The ability to copy (FTP) only those files that were changed since the last copy to a remote server. In Expression Web you could (with one click) “Publish all changed files” to the remote server. Again, does anything like that exists in VS website projects?? (or am I missing something??)
It just does not make sense that thousands of INDIVIDUAL developers like myself who maintain small to medium sized sites must manually keep a list of files we edit throughout the day or week and then copy those files to the remote server (potential for errors abound because a changed file was not pushed to the server!), or waste time pushing ALL of the files back up to the remote server (waste of bandwidth and processing as each page uploaded to the remote server will now be recompiled by IIS and cause a delay on the site). [end of rant]
I guess I am curious how other developers manage to maintain website projects when using Visual Studio? Or ... please provide the name of a utility that can accomplish what I have described above !
Thanks in Advance !