Visual Studio 2017 - Create a Publish Profile

In Visual Studio you can create Publish profiles to simplify the publishing process. You can add any number of profiles within a single project to publish the application for different scenarios or environments. Once the profile is created, you can use that profile to publish the application from Visual Studio or from command line.

You can create a publish profile by right click on the project and click Publish option.

Note that you need to launch the Visual Studio under Administrator mode in order to create/save a profile.

It will open a dialog and ask you to Pick a Publish target. In this example I am selecting the option IIS, FTP, etc.

Select the IIS, FTP, etc option and click Publish button on the bottom. It will open a new dialog allow you to configure profile. Fill in the required information. In this example, I am publishing MyApp on the server localhost.

Click the Next button, it will allow you to configure more settings, like Configuration, Target Framework, Remove additional files at destination etc.

After you are satisfied with the configuration settings click on the Save button. Visual Studio's publish tool creates an xml file at Properties/PublishProfiles/{PROFILE NAME}.pubxml describing the publish profile. This file contains configuration settings that will be consumed by the publishing process. You can easily edit this xml file to customize the publish process. When you click on the Save button, it will close this dialog and returns back to the project's publish screen. It will start publishing your project first time on the target server. In IIS it will create a new website with the name you provided during publish profile, and sets the Application pool to the DefaultAppPool

If everything goes fine, after successful publishing it will open the target URL in the default browser.