MSBuild project deploy to local folder with config transformed

Question

I'm having trouble trying to find the right way to use MSBuild to build a web project and output the project with only deployable files (i.e. no .cs, .csproj, .Debug.config etc.), but published to a local folder that I can then FTP, RoboCopy, (or whatever) to a secondary location.

The published output must have the Web.config file pre-transformed as per the specified configuration and the transformation config files (e.g. Web.Debug.config) not included in the output. I don't need any fancy publishing to IIS, database deployment or anything like that, I just want clean file system output that I can then test. Note that this cannot be done using visual tools as I want to run it as part of an automated build process.

I can generate a web deployment package, but I can't get WebDeploy to work because it doesn't seem to handle quoted command line options anymore (seems to be some kind of bug) and the directory structure has spaces, so I was hoping to accomplish the whole task using MSBuild, seeing as MSBuild seems to have native capacity to transform the config file (TransformXml), which is the only real bit of proper deployment functionality I'd be using.

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 25 '12 at 14:07

Got it figured out eventually. The following build script does the trick:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<Project ToolsVersion="4.0" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
    <UsingTask TaskName="TransformXml" AssemblyFile="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\Web\Microsoft.Web.Publishing.Tasks.dll"/>
    <PropertyGroup>
        <OutputDir>obj\website-output</OutputDir>
    </PropertyGroup>
    <Target Name="PrepareDeploy">
        <ItemGroup>
            <DeployableFiles Include="App_Code/**/*.*;App_Data/**/*.*;Areas/**/Views/**/*.*;bin/**/*.*;Views/**/*.*;*.aspx;*.asax;*.html;*.htm;sitemap.xml;*.ico;*.png" Exclude="App_Data/**/*.log" />
        </ItemGroup>
        <RemoveDir ContinueOnError="true" Directories="$(OutputDir)" />
        <MSBuild Projects="Website.csproj" />
        <MakeDir ContinueOnError="true" Directories="$(OutputDir)" />
        <Copy SourceFiles="@(DeployableFiles)" DestinationFiles="@(DeployableFiles->'$(OutputDir)\%(RelativeDir)%(Filename)%(Extension)')" />
        <TransformXml Source="Web.config" Transform="Web.$(Configuration).config" Destination="$(OutputDir)\web.config" />
    </Target>
</Project>

MSBuild project deploy to local folder with config transformed

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