Folks, before VS2012 you could right-click a web application project and say deploy/publish and it would precompile the app and put the results in a folder of your choice. You could then xcopy the contents straight over to a live site (I haven't done that for almost a year to the exact steps are a bit hazy now).
In VS2012 the publish process opens a totally new dialog that forces you to open an Azure account and sign-up for a profile before you can publish. Azure is utterly irrelevant to what we're doing. In the project property pages there is still an "Output Folder" field on the "MSBuild Options" tab, but I've no idea where that field is used. It hints that I have to use msbuild from the command line, but I've never need to do that before. *Where on earth has the facility gone to simply precompile an app?* Greg K
