Q:

How to publish ASP.NET Web API without Visual Studio?

How can I publish ASP.NET Web API without Visual Studio?
There is an external server, where must be only binaries or created project.
If I publish with the studio on localhost to the local IIS - no problem. But I need now publish it to the remote Windows server, where there isn't any Visual Studio, just IIS and RDP access.
I have tried to create a new web site from IIS management tool, assign the classic AppPool, assign new website to physical path, copy files from dev PC to that path.
And it just doesn't work and doesn't show any errors... How can I solve this problem?

A:

There are a number of publishing mechanisms you can look into to publish your website without Visual Studio. Out of the box you can take advantage of Publish Profiles, it sounds like you've already used this to publish locally, you can extend this to publish using Web Deploy or FTP - both require additional services to be setup on your web server though.
Web Deploy: http://www.iis.net/downloads/microsoft/web-deploy
How to: Deploy a Web Project Using One-Click Publish in Visual Studio: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd465337(v=vs.110).aspx
Once you've chosen a publish mechanism to use, you can execute the following command to build & publish, without Visual Studio: 
msbuild MyProject.sln /p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:PublishProfile=ProfileName

** NOTE: Long term, I'd recommend you build and deploy your project on a build server. The above is OK for a proof of concept or none-important projects.

