Method for Remote Development with Umbraco, ASP.NET

0
votes

My setup is as follows [Home Network, Dreamspark Software] :

  • Local workstation w/ Visual Studio 2015 Preview
  • Server VM 1 - Windows 2012 w/ SQL Server
  • Server VM 2 - Windows 2012 Web Server / IIS

I am traditionally only experienced with C# application development. I would like to dive into an ASP web application I have in mind and want to use Umbraco as the site's framework.

What I need clarification on are the logistics of the development environment vs. the IIS server.

I think ultimately I'd love to develop inside the Visual Studio IDE but at compile time have everything automagically publish to the IIS server.

I see online that the typical method is to locally install SQL and IIS express with Umbraco, develop locally, and then xcopy out to the IIS server.

Is there any way to avoid that? It seems kludgy and wasteful. I'd rather just use the IDE locally and have everything push out to IIS server.

Thanks in advance!

1
c#asp.netiisumbraco

1 Answers

1
votes

I believe you don't understand a main drawback with your development flow: what about debugging?

If you directly publish it to remote Web server (IIS), you won't be able to debug your code locally (you'll need to use the Visual Studio Remote Debugger, which doesn't work exactly as the local debugger), and whenever you need to test some advancement or improviement in your site, you'll need to publish it (think about the time that takes uploading files to your server).

Also, if you would automagically-publishing your site after every local build in Visual Studio, you might be uploading untested code to production. You would end up configuring another SQL Server and IIS Windows servers in order to have a production and development environment (actually, you'll need this anyway, because you don't want to excuse yourself with your user base saying that current release of your site works on your machine - who cares ;) -).

Usually, you've the whole SQL Server and IIS installed in your local machine and whenever you re-compile your solution, a F5 in your local machine's Web browser will be enough to check that your code is working as you expect.

After you've some project goals finished, you upload your site using WebDeploy feature available on Visual Studio. Once you've configured this, uploading your site to your server is just about one click!