I agree - it doth stink pretty badly. You either have to roll your own deployment platform (which we did but was expensive and time consuming) or you have to p

I agree - it doth stink pretty badly. You either have to roll your own deployment platform (which we did but was expensive and time consuming) or you have to put up with immature half finished tools with a learning curve from hell such as msdeploy. Just make something that works, doesn't require acres of XML, does configuration properly (web.config transforms don't work on app.config btw which sucks and you cant msdeploy anything related to clickonce). Batch files + robocopy are more useful at the moment than anything OOB.