In previous msbuild we used the target '_CopyWebApplication' in order to build and convert the source of a project into a published site, this worked OK, but wasn't ideal.

In .NET 4, the publishing process is somewhat more sophisticated and additionally seems a bit of a black box to understand.

Whilst packages look great, I cannot fully understand how they can be harnessed by a build server, the build server would not get any manifest information, and equally, something (msbuild?) is CREATING this manifest information FROM the project file.

In our build server, I ideally want to say, here is my csproj file, deploy it by the package configuration 'x'.

I'm trying to understand the workflow I need to make this happen.

Right now when I use _CopyWebApplication, the result is different to doing a publish from visual studio 2010, primarily that web.config transforms aren't processed, and obviously msdeploy isn't involved at all.

Can somebody point me in the right direction, I believe I need to get msbuild to do the equiv of 'Build Deployment Package', and then use msdeploy to deploy this from our build server to our CI testing environments.

I know this is a very vague post, but I hope somebody can give me some hints, I'll be continuing research also, so if I make any progress, I'll post my findings here.

Thanks in advance, Stephen.