Eventually, our journey through ASP.NET Core and Angular has come to an end. Our last effort was to get our native web application ready to be published into a production environment, where it can be checked by the product owner as the potentially shippable product it now definitely is.

The first thing we did was to change the underlying database from localDb to a real SQL Server instance. For the sake of simplicity, we chose to install SQL Server 2017 Express, which is freely available for download from the Microsoft Download Center. We briefly installed it, along with the SQL Server Management Studio tools and then we used the latter to properly configure the former: creating the database, adding the login credentials and doing what it takes to make our application able to connect using a standard connection string. We also took advantage of the ASP.NET Core default pattern to handle multiple environments--Development and Production--which we used to conditionally replace the localDb connection string with the SQL Server one.

The next step was to create a Publish profile for our Visual Studio project. We evaluated two alternatives--FTP and File System--each one of them being viable or not depending on our own deployment scenario.

Eventually, we switched to the Web Server, where we found out that configuring IIS was not as easy as it used to be for ASP.NET 4 and earlier, because the new CLR isn't fully integrated within the GUI yet. We had to install the .NET Core Windows Server Hosting bundle, which does all the required jobs, making IIS act like a reverse proxy for the underlying Kestrel server. Right after that, we were able to create our website entry along with its related Application Pool.

Once we did all that, we were able to actually publish our native web application and watch the result on the web browser. In the event that something didn't go as expected, we took some time to analyze the most common troubleshooting issues and give some useful advice to overcome them.