After a lonnnnng wait !! Today, the IIS team releases the new web deployment tool technical preview 1 :) The deployment tool called msdeploy.exe is essentially a migration toolkit similar with the one the shipped for IIS 6.0. However, the team spent extra effort and includes few extra features in the tool and called 'web deployment tool'. The new tool supports content sync per site or per server (IIS 6 migration tool only support one site per migration and config only), supports SSL cert migration (in IIS 6, you need to manually export the cert and import again in the destination server), etc. It also serves a backup tool where you can archive both content and config and restore the website when needed. It works with IIS 6 and IIS 7, so you can have any combination sync setup for both, say IIS 6-IIS6, IIS6-IIS7, IIS7-IIS7, etc.Take note that due to the changes in IIS 7.0, frontpage and webdav as standalone components are not supported in the deployment tool. For FTP, it does not support migration to the new out-of-band IIS 7 ftp package and etc.
The Web deployment team also started blogging with the release of the tool + new forum section for the tool discussion. You can also download the walkthrough guides from the team. I just quickly glance through the guides, at first it is quite confusing, maybe I was rushing :) This is a pure command line tool - NO GUI :( and with similar concept of AppCmd, Not the syntax format but the general concept of verb action against object. When you unzip the walkthrough, you will few docs + 2 folders (Offline and Remote). Offline walkthroughs demonstrates how you sync the content manually (copy to destination and sync), while remote allow you to sync content + config realtime to a destination server. I also found the msdeploy_readme.html inside the installation path quite useful as it detailed the current known issues and workaround for it.
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