Visual Studio 2013 Publish issue

Question

I converted a VS2010 ASP.Net MVC3 project to VS2013 MVC4. Now when I publish, it is copying the contents of my project to the bin folder.

I can't understand what I did to make it do this..How do I fix it so it doesn't do it?

Answer 1

Your files are incorrectly set to copy to the output folder (\bin) during build. Make sure that the Copy To Output setting on each file is set to Do Not Copy.

Normally, you don't need to copy much of anything to your bin folder. When publishing, all of the content pages (*.aspx, *.html, *.css, etc) will get picked up by publish just by existing in the project. This is determined by the Build Action being set to Content. (Note: you can exclude files by setting the Build Action to None)

For code files, there's 2 ways it could go. in a Web Application project (which MVC is) most code files, such as controllers, models, or code behind files in WebForms, are compiled into your site's DLL already. These have Build Action = Compile, meaning they get compiled up front and don't need to be included in the publish. The exception to this is files in App_Code, which are deployed to your site (Build Action = Content) and compiled at runtime. You can also choose to pre-compile your site in the publish settings (Settings -> File Publish Options -> Precompile during publishing), which will process the App_Code files automatically (i.e. you can leave them as Build Action = Content and VS will compile them and publish the output instead).