Is there a way to make the VS2010 publish wizard to copy App_offline.htm while it is publishing the site?

Question

After seeing the Hanselman \"You are doing it wrong\" video I start to use the Web Publish feature of VS2010.

What I\'m really missing is that the websites sometimes giv

Answer 1

Web Deploy (MSDeploy) v3 supports adding an app_offline.htm file during deployment, but it has two limitations for your purpose:

• It uses it's own app_offline.htm template (it supports a custom template, but it does not work)
• The Web Publishing Pipeline (the MSBuild stack on top of web deploy) doesn't support passing in custom rules to MSDeploy, which rules out using WPP.