[2005] publishing vs. ftp'ing

Hi there,

This may sound super naive however I come from a world of .exe files and I am making the switch to .aspx! fun, fun... So this is my question.

I have a test account that supports ASPX hosting. All is well but when I first created my page all I did was ftp the files over both the .cs and .aspx files - all seemed to work well. Then I decided to publish to the site... Bad idea. Nothing worked. I deleted everything and re-ftp'd it over and it works again. Obviously there is every chance in the world that when I published it I just screwed something up.

Really the meat of the question is what should I be doing? publishing or using FTP? What are the pros and cons.

Thanks for you insight.

Publishing is a feature they've provided, but it isn't necessarily the most intuitive.

The difference between the two is that in publishing, the website is compiled into a DLL and then uploaded to the folder that you specified. With ftp, you're uploading everything there, including code files.

Why didn't your publishing work? It could be anything from configuration issues to malicious hamster in the servers.

so if I just upload it does the server compile the dll's? Seems like publishing would be a huge performance gain.

Also - I feel very strongly that there is malicious hamsters in the server. I wonder if there is a update for that?

Try Cat 2.0. Works wonders for me.

When publishing, all of your DLL's need to end up in your project's bin folder. Every page will be published pointing there for its' info. I'd suggest creating a folder on your desktop, publishing your project to that folder, then FTP'ing the contents of that folder as is to your server. Should work fine.