Publishing VS2010 Web Projects using command line

Since I started developing using Visual Studio 2010, I was impressed about WebDeploy integration into IDE. Particularly I was found one key publishing feature very useful for me:

Especially I use “File System” publish method. I was searching a way to execute this publish scenario from command prompt, maybe on machine without Visual Studio installed.

It took me a couple of hours of googling, but finally I found 2 blog posts that made me to complete the puzzle: Daniel Chambers post and Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi post.

Here is my working combination:

1. Add {ProjectName}.wpp.targets file to Web app project folder (right aside of .csproj file), where {ProjectName} is the name of project (name of project file).
2. Add new target to the file from #1. This target is responsible to copy site files to the specified destination:
   

      1: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

      2: <Project xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">

      3:    <Target Name="PublishToFileSystem" DependsOnTargets="PipelinePreDeployCopyAllFilesToOneFolder">

      4:     <Error Condition="'$(PublishDestination)'==''" Text="The PublishDestination property must be set to the intended publishing destination." />

      5:     <MakeDir Condition="!Exists($(PublishDestination))" Directories="$(PublishDestination)" />

      6:     

      7:     <ItemGroup>

      8:         <PublishFiles Include="$(_PackageTempDir)\**\*.*" />

      9:     </ItemGroup>

     10:  

     11:     <Copy SourceFiles="@(PublishFiles)" DestinationFiles="@(PublishFiles->'$(PublishDestination)\%(RecursiveDir)%(Filename)%(Extension)')" SkipUnchangedFiles="True" />

     12: </Target>

     13: </Project>

3. Call new target defining actual parameters:

   1: %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\MSBuild Mvc.csproj /T:PublishToFileSystem /p:Configuration=Release;PublishDestination=C:\Sites\Mvc;AutoParameterizationWebConfigConnectionStrings=false

Please note last parameter ‘AutoParameterizationWebConfigConnectionStrings’. This parameter set to false in order to keep web.config file transformed according to build configuration BUT NOT tokenized.