Create and publish .net web application programmatically

Question

I am creating an application that should be able to publish itself to the specified directory on the command line.

I'm looking for something like

System.BuildSystem.Build(<project file>, 'release');
System.BuildSystem.Publish(<project file>, <destination folder>);

Is it possible?

Answer 1

Take a look at msbuild or nant. Personally, I use msbuild to distribute releases in our QA environment and create packages for deployment to production.

Your application may, for example, invoke batch files that run msbuild scripts to create and publish assemblies.