MVC 3 Deploy Automation

I am looking for the most straight forward way to automate the deploy of an MVC 3 application. There is a wealth of in开发者_如何转开发formation on Stack Overflow already, but much of it seems to be old, and I am not sure what is still relevant to MVC 3.

Here is what I am trying to achieve:

• Publish MVC application
• Zip files
• Copy zip to remote location

It is the “Publish” part of this I am having the most trouble with. Here are my main points of confusion:

• How can an automated build be initiated for an MVC 3 app? Do we need to use the AspNetComiler MSBuild Task? I have seen an example of this uses in conjunction with a CSC Task. Are both really needed?
• There is a “Build Deployment Package” option in Visual Studio. Can this be initiated with MSBuild? Should this be used instead?
• Web Deployment Projects: where do these fit into the picture?

Thanks for any help

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I am by far not specialist in application deployment so there might be better ways but here's what I do.

• I use Web Deployment Projects to precompile my ASP.NET MVC 3 application
• I feed the result of this project to a Setup and Deployment Project
• I wrote a custom assembly which is applied to this Setup and Deplyment Project as an Install step and which based on the target IIS version creates App Pool and Virtual Directories.
• I ship an MSI to the team responsible for deploying the application. All they need to do is to schedule a task which does an msiexec /u myapp.msi and then msiexec /i myapp.msi.

Remark : in my case all builds are automated in a continuous integration fashion with a Team Foundation Server Build but if you don't have a build server you could also build it manually by running the setup and deployment project which spits an MSI.