Hi.
I have developed my DNN 4.3.5 site locally.  I used the "Publish" function in VS2005 and published it without problem to "http://localhost/mysite".  It works without problems in this instance.  (I use the publish function because it compiles all of my code that I don't want to leave available online.  Is there another way?)
Ok so the next thing to do is to get it out there to the masses so I clicked the sponsors link and bought some space on WebHostForASP.NET.  Using their Automatic install I can set up a clean instance of DNN that works no problem.
So here's the big question...
??What's the next step??
I'm now into day 4 of trying everything I can think of.  Is there a tried and tested way of deploying your local work?  Most errors I've had were in and around the database, can't find it, can't log in etc even though the support guys were/are working well with me on the problem.  I can even view/edit the db using Management Studio Express untility but dispite all my efforts in and around web.config and I stress again the dev version and the deployed version work just fine locally.

How do you do it?  Any help at all for my aching brain here would be much appreciated.

Other notes:
The VS Publish function creates a lot of new classes in the bin folder, is there something about them needed to be registered on the host?
Should I use the VS Publish function to publish to the host?  (Tried and it didn't work - Did I do something wrong?)
Should I do a clean install and then over write the new server files with my local files and sync the databases.

If you do any of this at least I'll know what to keep working at.

Any help at all guys, especially if you've worked with the same host.

Ray.
Dublin, Ireland.

This is just what I was looking for. Installing DNN on works new server tomorrow and will hopefully be uploading my newly developed portal using the above method. Thanks pmichael.

As payback maybe I can help with a workaround for "references to files on the file system". I am quite new to DNN, so I'm not sure if this is a solution that may cause problems as I haven't fully tested it yet, as currently I am developing locally.

I've been considering the issue of file links as I realised a while back that my images were hard linked in the text/html module to the root of my local site as shown below:

/DotNetNuke/portal/0/TutorialPages/HTML/Images/HelloWorld_Code.jpg

It was only when I was investigating uploading of my portal to the server that I realised that I didn't need:

/DotNetNuke/portal/0/

I tried, about 3 hours ago, to play around with the path and quickly discovered that either of the following works just as well:

./TutorialPages/HTML/Images/HelloWorld_Code.jpg
   
or

TutorialPages/HTML/Images/HelloWorld_Code.jpg

I am hoping that this means I now need to fix all the links on my development server but when I upload the portal I shouldn't need to fix anything on the server.

The only issue with this so far is that the image does not show up when editing the contents of the text/html module, but I think I can live with this. [From now on I will insert the image and then once happy with the content I will shorten the path before updating the module].