Oct 31, 2008 : DiscountASP.NET Offers IIS Tool Beta

📅 October 31, 2008 - Among the news to emerge from Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference taking place this week in Los Angeles was an announcement from Microsoft partner DiscountASP.NET (discountasp.net 👉 Total Reviews: 20
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During a Wednesday presentation entitled "Deploying Web Applications with IIS 7.0 and the Web Deployment Tool" the Windows hosting provider announced the new service, a free beta hosting program designed to allow a limited number of developers to get used to using the next generation Web Deployment Tool, and give feedback.

The Web Deployment Tool is "a tool for simplifying the deployment, management and migration of Web applications, sites and even entire servers," according to the informational section on the IIS website - incidentally a great place to find out all or most of what there is to know about the tool.

DiscountASP.NET says it will operate the open beta until March 31, 2009, providing the first 2,000 users who sign up with 50 MB of disk space and 50 MB of SQL Server 2008 database space. Developers can sign up at the DiscountASP.NET "labs" site.

"One of the common technical support issues that our team receives is from customers who have a working web application on their local development computer which fails to function properly when deployed on our production web hosting environment. The new Web Deployment tool makes deploying applications easier," says Takeshi Eto, VP marketing and business development at DiscountASP.NET, quoted in the press release. "We are proud to work in partnership with Microsoft to help improve the web application deployment experience for developers."

This specific project is one of a few examples of Microsoft working with hosting provider partners, of which it has many, to provide beta environments where developers can get used to working with products prior to their official release. IIS 7 was one such product. The software giant has a "go live" licensing model designed to enable these sorts of free beta scenarios.