Visual Studio 2010 has an extremely functional and easy-to-use publish feature built-in. I use it to push sample code and changes up to my free ASP.NET 4.0 RC trial account (sure, I can get a site free as the CEO, but with this beta program running through March, anyone can get a free test account!).

When you get your account information for your hosting account it will contain all the information needed to quickly and easily set up VS2010 for 1-click-publishing. With those few pieces of information in hand, select the VS2010 Publish option then "<New...>" to add the connection.

You then get a dialog box with fields for you to enter your account information.

The service URL for our free beta program is already entered above, as is the name of my personal test site. I then just enter my username and password, and save the connection using the huge button at the top of the window. Note that if you click Close or Publish the settings will not get saved automatically.

Once the connection is set up, all you need to do for your code to be uploaded to the site is to click the single Publish icon.

If you need to edit the settings for any reason, there is a easy access edit icon right there next to the publish icon.

Microsoft has made it super easy with Visual Studio 2010 to publish and maintain your ASP.NET applications. You should definitely set up and use this handy feature.

Visual Studio 2010, the latest and greatest version of Microsoft's developer toolset, will be releasing soon. I've been around hundreds of users (OrcsWeb clients, MVPs, and industry Insiders) who have used it through the beta cycle (as I have too) and the comments are overwhelmingly positive. If you haven't tried it out yet, you might want to check it out for free during the current RC phase.

Once you've got it downloaded and running, feel free to set up a free ASP.NET 4.0 RC test hosting account with us this month to try out the deployment related features and the general hosting experience.

Somasegar recently blogged with an announcement about special pricing ($299) for current users of VS2005 and/or VS2008 to upgrade to Visual Studio 2010. That's great. Thanks Microsoft!

Did you know we have free hosting accounts available to test out ASP.NET 4.0 RC and Visual Studio 2010 through the month of March 2010?

http://vs2010host.com/

This is a great way to test out the new features of ASP.NET 4.0 and Visual Studio. We also support WebDeploy, one-click-publishing, and the remote IIS 7 management tools. This is a great opportunity to check them out - for free!

And of course if you need quality production hosting, we at OrcsWeb have managed dedicated hosting, Hyper-V based virtual dedicated hosting, and windows shared hosting options available.

First things first, you can download the Visual Web Developer 2010 Express Edition Beta 2 (wow, that sure is a mouth-full!) for free from Microsoft's site here.

On the initial welcome screen there is nothing to do but click next. No option to opt-out from sending your information to Microsoft. Hey, it is a beta, and a major goal with beta programs is to get feedback, so I certainly don't blame them for locking that in.

Next, agree to the license (read it first of course).

After that you get an optional install screen. There is only one option presented to me, and it's SQL Server 2008 Express SP1. I'm going to select it and highly suggest you do to. After all, what fun is a web application without a SQL source?

The next screen lets you select a specific install folder - or accept the default.

I'm going to leave the defaults alone. Space requirement shows as 3.2GB, which isn't horribly large. Well, yeah, it's big for sure, but just wait until you see everything included - then you'll likely agree that 3.2GB of space is not a bad trade-off.

Click install from there and a download and install process starts. I show 18 items for a total of 292MB being downloaded, which matches what the install screen earlier showed. What takes up the additional 3GB?? I guess I'll have to wait and see.

Well, the install is done now. That was painless. I have no idea why the space requirements were 3.2GB though. I've clicked around the folders and did a quick estimate around 400MB of new files. Either the install needs a ton of temporary installation space (3GB) or maybe that's a small bug on the install screen.