How to publish my MVC 3 web application onto IIS7

Question

if possible I need total from the beginning utter beginner advice on how to get my ASP.Net MVC 3 Razor Visual Studio 10 web application live onto my IIS 7 webserver please?

I've never tried to publish this before, and wondering what I'm missing?

I've clicked "Publish" on Visual Studio Express 10, created a "published" version of the website. I've uploaded it to my webserver, however can't make it load on the net?

Appreciate some guidance please? (not sure how / what default documents work etc...?)

Solution

By far the easiest approach is to use Web Application Deployment.

This blog by Scott Gu gives a great intro

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/07/29/vs-2010-web-deployment.aspx

The article talks about web.config transformations (ability to have a .Release and a .Debug version of your web.config). Later, that capability was generalized through an add-on package to work for any XML-structured file in your deployment (for example, I use it with NLog configuration files).

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/SlowCheetahWebconfigTransformationSyntaxNowGeneralizedForAnyXMLConfigurationFile.aspx

Comments

[Harry]

Thank you Eric, I'll have a read of that. Apologies for the ignorance, do I have to do anything to IIS7 (running on svr 2008) to allow this to all work?

[Erik Funkenbusch]

@Harry - that walkthrough assumes many things, such as that you have a working site configured on the server, and MVC installed on it. Do you have that much?

[Harry]

This is it, I've not installed MVC myself, and looking for absolute beginner advice on the steps I need to take. Where would I go to install MVC on IIS7? again, sorry for the ignorance.