Visual Studio Publish vs Build in release (c# Web Application)

Question

So I'm still new to the stack overflow game, and when I first went to ask this question, I saw ones that were similar, however they did not provide the level of detail I was looking for.

I have a web applications project in c# and it is a rather large project in size. I was curious what are the pro's and cons for Building Said Solution in Release mode and Deploying it, Versus Publishing the Project. I have never used the Publish Feature of Visual Studio before, so for giggles I tested it on an earlier project, I built to release, and on the other hand I published it, and instantly noticed a difference in the two.

Now yes this is a rather dumb question but can anyone please explain the difference in publishing versus building to release, also the pros and cons of the two methods as well as when to publish versus when I should build the project to release.

I appreciate the time guys!

Answer 1

When you build your project, visual studio compiles the C# code and creates some output (like dll files) out of it. These files along with other stuff (e.g. html files, images, etc.) can be then copied to another machine and be deployed. Publishing, on the other hand, can somehow automate this process by collecting all the required resources and putting them in a folder whether on a disk or FTP or directly upload them to a cloud system like Azure.

Therefore, these are pretty much the same; the former only compiles while the latter compiles and can also copy the results to another place i.e. deploy it too.