Web Deployment Projects with Visual Studio 2005 

Ok so I am late... really late on this one.  Every once in a while you stumble upon a piece of technology that you are amazed at but then you investigate the publication date - over a year ago!?

 So the little add-in for deploying web projects is freakin' cool.  I think I confused this product with the ASP Net Web Project mod that let you create Visual Studio 2003 style web projects in Visual Studio 2005 (a step backwards in my opinion).  This is a totally different beast.  This add-in will allow you to add a 'Web Deployment' 'project' into your existing solution.  It's called a web deployment project but it really isn't.  Rather, it is a solution entity which contains some configuration settings and 'technically' no additional files.

 The absolute coolest part?  Web.Config section replacements!!  Did you get that?  You can create a deployment project to deploy your web application and the deployment project will automatically perform web.config section replacements.  This is so very convenient for deploying to Staging or Production because you can define a seperate .config file for your ConnectionStrings or your AppSettings for each deployment type.  This allows you to retain the development web.config as usual but author a new .config file to house the section you want merged/replaced unpon deployment.