The Web Deployment tool (Web Deploy) is an extension of IIS 7 that simplifies the packaging and deployment of Windows Server AppFabric applications and services.
While there is no reason that you can't use your own deployment framework (including XCOPY deployment, which is certainly supported), Web Deploy is useful for providing a consistent, yet extensible way to streamline the deployment of WCF and WF service-based applications to IIS and Windows Server AppFabric. Web Deploy facilitates a seamless transition from Visual Studio to Windows Server AppFabric whether you are targeting one or multiple instances of Windows Server AppFabric, which is useful for single server, modestly sized, or larger enterprise deployments.
In this recipe, we will follow a step-by-step process for installing, configuring, and testing Web Deploy on Windows Server AppFabric.