<p>What is the difference between publishing a website with visual studio and just copying the files over to the server?  Is the only difference that the publish files are pre-compiled?</p>

[{'answer_id': 78906, 'author': 'David Negron', 'author_id': 981, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/981', 'pm_score': 1, 'selected': False, 'text': '<p>I believe you are correct in your assumption. It has been my experience that the only difference is that published files are compiled. <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=0AA30AE8-C73B-4BDD-BB1B-FE697256C459&amp;displaylang=en" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Visual Studio® 2008 Web Deployment Projects</a> is a nice enhancement for customizing your build scripts for both your Websites and Web Applications.</p>\n'}, {'answer_id': 79017, 'author': 'mattlant', 'author_id': 14642, 'author_profile': 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/14642', 'pm_score': 3, 'selected': True, 'text': '<p>There is not much difference between "publish", and copying the files. Publish appears in a webapplication. The only difference really is publishing gives you the option to only include html and dll\'s, where as copying you would need to parse out source code manually. There is no full precompiling in the publish option, as Fully precompiled means no HTML at all; The aspx files are just placeholders; All html is in the compiled binaries.</p>\n'}]
['https://Stackoverflow.com/questions/78850', 'https://Stackoverflow.com', 'https://Stackoverflow.com/users/2066/']