- Web Deployment Projects and Web Deploy (aka MSDeploy) are not mutually exclusive; you can use a WDP to create a Web Deploy deployment package. Web Deploy is an IIS tool that can be used by Visual Studio or MSBuild. In Visual Studio 2010 the Web Publishing Pipeline is implemented using MSBuild so that it can work the same way from the IDE (the one-click publish feature) or by invoking MSBuild targets from the command line. See this MSDN page:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd394698.aspx
If you're using VS 2010 or later and you are using web application projects rather than web site projects, you don't need Web Deployment Projects unless you want to build a precompile/merge step into deployment. If you're using web site projects, you still need to use Web Deployment Projects.
WDP's days are numbered, it will not be evolving.