Visual-studio – what is the difference between web deployment tool 2.1 and web deploy 3.5? which one is required for deploys from VS 2010

asp.netiisvisual studio

I am trying to setup publishing/deployment of an asp.net mvc project from visual studio to a box running IIS 7.5/Windows Server 2008. I found this useful tutorial and know I need to install something called web deploy.

When I go to install this from Web Platform Installer I see a few options: web deployment tool 2.1, web deploy 3.5 and
web deploy 3.5 for hosting servers.

Which one do I need? What is the difference?

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Best Answer

One might want to know why there's two different names for one single product.

While struggling getting this thing working I used many websites to solve the issues I encountered. Reading the team blog, ScottGu's blog, Technet sites, downloading from the Microsoft download centre and as you, using the Web Platform installer I encountered references to the same product using different names.

As far as I can summarize there's this list of versions:

  • Web Deployment Tool 1.0, released 2009-09
  • Web Deployment Tool 1.1, released 2010-01
  • Web Deployment Tool 2.0, released 2011-04
  • Web Deployment Tool 2.1, released 2011-04
  • Web Deploy 3.0, released 2012-07
  • Web Deploy 3.5, released 2013-07
  • Web Deploy 3.6, released 2015-07

Although the official product name has been 'Web Deployment Tool', references to it are written as 'Web Deploy' (as in: Below are the steps for how to install Web Deploy on a production server...) It's rather confusing...

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