First, you need to have installed and configurated "IIS Server", a service, that is part of "Windows server". Normally, on Windows Home or even Premium you don't have IIS.
When you install Visual Studio, it install "IIS Server Express Edition" on your computer for write pages, but it will not host you pages for all day (you can't use windows "home" as "server". To host you pages, you need to buy "Windows Server xyz, where xyz is year, ex: windows server 2012").
When you have installed IIS on server, then:
- copy files (from bin, or by publish to file system) to catalog on server
- go to IIS server, and create "app pool"
- in IIS server, create web site, set "app pool" and directory
- make sure, your catalog on server (first bulleted) have priviles to "IIS_user" or just make your catalog in C:\inetpub\yourWebsite\ ( Should I put my ASP.NET websites in the wwwroot folder? )
- in ISS you can set "bindings" or something else ex: log user for you website depending on Active Directory logon (when they log to their account in active directory, they will by automated log to your web site).
" In a trivial test case, I hosted a HTML file simply by creating a folder that contained it in my wwwroot, yet this doesn't work for the Visual Studio project (because I'm forgetting to do something). How do I set this up?"
I have this once. You need install more services that have correlation with ISS (you don't have good configured ISS).