Several times we encounter a great and sophisticated web or desktop application that does not poses it's appropriate market share just for the reason of poorly written SETUP package and poorly designed deployment strategy. The fact is simple: If your users are not able to easily deploy your application then whatever sophistication or features you provide, they will be unable to even experience your application from the very first place!
opy Web Site is a new technique provided in ASP.NET 2.0 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 (Available from the Website / Copy Web Site... Menu option). Although this technique is performed from inside Visual Studio (in contrast with the XCOPY deployment technique which is performed from outside Visual Studio), there is no compilation performed at all. All your pages are still in their source code form on the production server. Some developers see this fact as a high risk on their intellectual property. Two extra disadvantages of this technique (and in fact any other technique that does not involve any compilation before deployment) are reduced error checking and the slow initial page load.
The reduced error checking is a direct result to that no compilation is performed and hence some errors may be discovered by your users later. The initial page load slowness is also because nothing is compiled yet and the entire web application has to be compiled at the time the first page is being requested. An advantage of this technique over the XCOPY deployment is that you have the options to deploy to the File System, the Local IIS, the FTP Sites, and the Remote Sites. Please see figure 1.