There has always been one area in the religious war between .NET and JEE where Java Enterprise developers had the right to lean back and start smiling: Packaging and deployment features for web and service applications. While Java EE has been offered very well integrated mechanisms like JAR, WAR, EAR and OSGi for years now, deploying .NET web and service application has always been cumbersome, painful and half-baked at best. Of course there are XCOPY, the "Publish..." feature in Visual Studio, the Web Deployment Project Template for Websites and Web Applications (although that did not always work as expected in the latter case), the option to use MSI, and numerous application specific mechanisms like the SharePoint Solution Framework and the Sitecore Packaging API, but lets be honest, deploying web applications with .NET is a painful obstacle course and if you don't know how to handle certain build and automation tools (especially MSBuild, NAnt and FinalBuilder), it really, really sucks.

Well, it seems that this could change very soon. Today, Microsoft released the Web Deployment Tool (a.k.a. MSDeploy), which is not only based on MSBuild, but it will also be fully integrated with VS2010, Team Build and other servers, tools and frameworks. Take a look at the announcement here and enjoy the already existing integration with IIS7, which has been laying around for some time now: http://misfitgeek.com/blog/web-deployment-tool-has-gone-rtw/