Web Deploy (MSDeploy) is actually a fully standalone product. The Visual Studio Deployment Tool (or at least was) is usually referred to as the "Web Publishing Pipeline" and consists of the MS Build goals / tasks that port MSDeploy (among other things)
You can directly call MSDeploy.exe ( %programfiles%\IIS\Microsoft Web Deploy V3\msdeploy.exe ) to create packages and deploy to remote IIS servers. The tool is Windows only.
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