14 DAY TRIAL // A Visual Studio add-in released by Microsoft is designed to make it easier for developers to build websites and Cloud-based applications using the latest iteration of the development platform. Visual Studio 2010 Web Deployment Projects RTW went live on the Microsoft Download Center on May 24th, and is available free of charge. The add-in integrates seamlessly with all the editions of Visual Studio 2010, with the exception of Visual Studio 2010 Express. However, devs running the Professional, Premium or Ultimate SKUs of VS2010 will have no problems leveraging the extension for their projects.
“Visual Studio 2010 Web Deployment Projects provide additional functionality to build and deploy Web sites and Web applications in Visual Studio 2010. This add-in provides a comprehensive UI to manage build configurations, merging, and using pre-build and post-build tasks with MSBuild,” Microsoft stated.
According to the Redmond company, one of the selling points of Visual Studio 2010 Web Deployment Projects is that it ensures backward compatibility with previous releases of the add-in. In this regard, even if devs upgrade to the latest version of Visual Studio and the most recent release of the Web Deployment Projects, they will still be able to enjoy compatibility with Visual Studio 2008 Web Deployment Projects and Visual Studio 2005 Web Deployment Projects.
“Web Deployment Projects provides developers with advanced compilation options. A Web Deployment Project is an extensible msbuild script, enabling web developers to create pre-build and post-build actions,” the company added. “Web Deployment projects do not change the way Visual Studio 2010 Web Sites or Web Application Projects build. Instead, they take an existing Visual Studio Web project as input and generate a precompiled Web as an output. A Web Deployment Project does not change the files in the source Web site project in any way.” Visual Studio 2010 Web Deployment Projects RTW is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Premium is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Professional is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate is available for download here.
Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 is available for download here.
.NET Framework 4 RTM is available for download here.