No unfortunately not. The publish feature basically writes out a new copy
of the entire Web site and then pushes the whole thing up to the server.
It's ugly to say the least especially with stock projects. There's really
no good workaround for this because the ASP.NET compiler wipes the
timestamps from the files so there's no way to even manually diff the
files based on dates. You can manually do it via FTP off the output files.
There are some ways that can make this easier. One is Web Deployment
projects which can basically compile your entire code of the site into a
single assembly making update deployment a bit easier. Or you can use Web
Application Projects (part of SP1 of Visual Studio) which does codebehind
compilation. But neither of these solutions really offer you a dynamic
publish feature - you still have to manually manage updates or suffer
through uploading the same files even if they haven't changed.
I wrote an article on this topic some time ago that explains how all this
works and shows a few of the differences, but be forewarned it's not a
quick read <s>...
http://www.west-wind.com/presentations/AspNetCompilation/AspNetCompilation.asp
Hope this helps,
+++ Rick ---
--
Rick Strahl
West Wind Technologies
www.west-wind.com/weblog