Build once and deploy to multiple environments with msdeploy & Visual Studio 2012

Question

Working on centralizing configurations, app settings and connection strings, for multiple solutions, while also switching over to use msdeploy from command line to deploy we

Answer 1

We use #5 and it works very well. Using MSBuild for publish profiles provides a bunch of flexibility (Items are particularly useful).

In our deployment pipeline, only the website package, build/beployment targets and publish profiles are made available to deployment stages. Source code, including project files, are only utilised by the build/test stage.

FYI, we went with publish profiles specifically as you'll quickly run into the problem of keeping environment specific server details / credentials, skip clauses and parameter values together. WPP / Publish Profiles track all these things in the pubxml file, and MSBuild's features allow for some nice convention-over-configuration "helpers" for common-but-"noisy" tasks.