Chapter 16. Deploying ASP.NET AJAX Applications

When you think of deploying a Web application, you may just think of the process necessary to move the application from a development machine or a test environment on to the production machine. But of course, there is more to it than just copying files across the network. In this chapter, you will see that there are really three distinct phases to deployment: preparing for deployment, the process of deployment itself, and the final stage: monitoring and tuning and application.

Once the application is developed and tested, as discussed in the previous chapter, you need to prepare it for deployment. You can think of this as the predeployment phase with a checklist to utilize to ensure the best results possible. There is a common set of pitfalls that can be avoided by checking and then double-checking some settings before proceeding to deployment that will save you time in the long run. And a key part of the checklist is ensuring that the production servers have the necessary bits (the code, images, and Web pages) duplicated from the development environment to handle the deployment without error. People often talk about "the bits" being moved when they are referring to the settings, code, and binaries involved in an application.

The development environment and the production environment are usually different. They have different hardware, distinct database back ends, unique connection strings, and separate network topologies. The Web Deployment projects of Visual Studio provide an environment for automating the process of deploying your application from a development environment into a test environment and ultimately into production.

And once the application is in production, you need to know how it is behaving. You will want to examine the load and potentially find ways to optimize for better performance. This chapter offers some options for tuning ASP.NET AJAX for maximum throughput and resilience. By leveraging client and server caches intelligently, an application can yield better response times and minimize server processes. This makes an application appear faster to the user and can significantly reduce processing power requirements.