I just received a message from a reader asking about how he can extend the package process in Visual Studio 2010 RC to include files that his web project doesn't contain or reference. If you are not familiar with this Visual Studio 2010 has support for creating Web Packages now. These packages can be used with the Web Deployment Tool to simply deployments. The Web Deployment Tool is also known as MSDeploy.

He was actually asking about including external dependencies, but in this post I will show how to include some text files which are already written to disk. To extend this to use those dependencies should be pretty easy. Here is what I did:

1. Created a new ASP.NET MVC 2 Project (because he stated this is what he has)
2. Added a folder named Extra Files one folder above where the .csproj file is located and put a few files there
3. In Visual Studio right clicked on the project selected “Unload Project”
4. In Visual Studio right clicked on the project selected “Edit project”

Then at the bottom of the project file (right above the </Project> statement). I inserted the following XML fragments.

<PropertyGroup>
  <CopyAllFilesToSingleFolderForPackageDependsOn>
    CustomCollectFiles;
    $(CopyAllFilesToSingleFolderForPackageDependsOn);
  </CopyAllFilesToSingleFolderForPackageDependsOn>
</PropertyGroup>
<Target Name="CustomCollectFiles">
  <ItemGroup>
    <_CustomFiles Include="..\Extra Files\**\*">
      <DestinationRelativePath>%(RecursiveDir)%(Filename)%(Extension)</DestinationRelativePath>
    </_CustomFiles>

    <FilesForPackagingFromProject  Include="%(_CustomFiles.Identity)">
      <DestinationRelativePath>Extra Files\%(RecursiveDir)%(Filename)%(Extension)</DestinationRelativePath>
    </FilesForPackagingFromProject>
  </ItemGroup>
</Target>

Here I do a few things. First I extend the CopyAllFilesToSingleFolderForPackage target by extending its DependsOn property to include my target CustomCollectFiles. This will inject my target at the right time into the Web Publishing Pipeline. Inside that target I need to add my files into the FilesForPackagingFromProject item group, but I must do so in a particular manner. Specifically I have to define the relative path to where it should be written. This captured inside the DestinationRelativePath metadata item. This is required because sometimes you may have a file which is named, or in a different folder, than it was originally. After you do that you will see that the web package that is created when you create a web package from Visual Studio (or from the command line using msbuild.exe for that matter) contains your custom files.

I just posted a blog about my upcoming talk discussing Web Deployments and ASP.NET MVC, once again check it out :)

Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi