MSBuild not triggering WebDeploy

Question

Multiple TFS 2010 MSBuilds are not triggering Web Deploy to publish the web application to the IIS website.

This is for multiple different software products, multiple different build configurations, 2 different build agents (on 2 different servers), multiple IIS web site instances on multiple different servers.

3 different continuous deployment setups were previously working.

So hopefully this rules out miss-configuration of the build/build servers/hosting servers/web deploy and IIS.

According to the network manager nothing has changed on the network (all servers are local), and port 8172 is not blocked by any security configurations.

All builds succeed, web deploy fails silently (no error, nothing in the logs). It appears that web deploy is no longer being triggered.

Are there any other ports that are used here? What else could be blocking the communication between MSBuild and Web Deploy? Would you expect it to fail silently (nothing in the logs or passed back to MSBuild)?

UPDATE This is a similar question How to determine if MSBUILD Arguments were executed for TFS Build Definition

Samella

The folder 'Web' didn't exist. Now added it, will update shortly. I had already added 'WebApplications' for the 'Microsoft.WebApplication.targets' build dependency. – Samella

@atrljoe That was it! Ye ha! Strangely one MVC project was still deploying without these folders! – Samella

I had the same issues, it was weird, no errors or anything some worked some didnt. So I finally dug into and found that some projects require those folders to deploy. I will post as answer for other people to know what the resolution was. – Penury

Answer 1

Assuming you are using vs2012, on your build server make sure the following two folders exist: Web & WebApplications in

C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v11.0

If these dont exist then need to be copied from a machine your do development on. This worked for me, and solved all of my problems with the Deployment of projects.

Penury

Cheers, I found out is it because when you do a publish from VS2012 these extra dependencies are put into the .sln file. The projects that were still working didn't have these libraries referenced in the sln, because no developer had done a local publish. – Samella

@Samella Nice. Got to love microsoft not reporting any error when this occurs. Thanks for the update! – Penury