I've been doing some reading http://vishaljoshi.blogspot.com/2010/11/team-build-web-deployment-web-deploy-vs.html and https://michaelbaylon.wordpress.com/2011/04/13/managing-sql-scripts-and-continuous-integration/ ... etc on automated deployment and continuous integration etc but non of it seems to talk about automated deployment in a classic asp environment and you can't really do proper CI unless you get into automated deployment.
Can MSDeploy deploy a classic asp website? If not ... is it best to just write a build script that copies all the files over to the correct folder and then start up IIS? I've done this using msbuild and the robocopy msbuild extension task. But then how do you handle the different environments (QA, dev, staging, production) there's no web config to put the different connection strings etc ... supposedly msbuild is configuration aware ... but how does that work when there is no web config?
So with all these questions I'm struggling to really move forward with creating a deployment script / module / exe for our classic asp website. Does anyone have any answers / resources / further questions that they can point me in the direction of?
MSDEPLOY can deploy anything that can live in IIS. You can create a package from the existing web site, and examine it to see what got packaged. You should be able to use that to determine how to package up your site from sources.
You should even be able to create a Visual Studio project from your sources so that you can use the Web Publishing Pipeline directly. The fact that there is nothing there to compile shouldn't stop you from specifying that your .ASP files are content files.