OK I found the solution but it took me a whole day to get it working! Basically the steps are as follows. This is very sketchy but see the detailed guides below which helped me.
- Enable the IIS Web Management role feature.
- Install Web Deploy 3.0 (or higher). Make sure to customise the install to include the handlers (See notes below). If you're not presented with this option go to add/remove programs, find webdeploy, right click and select "change" option.
- In IIS click on the server node and find the "Management Service" icon. Enable remote access and configure a dedicated IIS User for remote deployment (These will be the credentials that will go in the user name and password boxes).
- At the site level in IIS assign this user to manage the website.
- Make sure port 8172 is open on the web server (you can check this port here).
- Try reconnecting from Visual Studio. There was some trial and error here for me but the error messages do link to a MS guide for decoding :)
- Even after connecting successfully I had to wrangle with permissions, so my IIS user had sufficient privileges to create the app pool, directories and general file management jobs.
The following links really helped!
Configuring the handler on the web server:
http://www.iis.net/learn/publish/using-web-deploy/configure-the-web-deployment-handler
Connecting via Visual Studio:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd465337(v=vs.110).aspx
NOTES:
To ensure the handler is running, login into your IIS server and point your browser to the following URL.
https://<servername>:8172/MsDeploy.axd
F12 to open up the dev tools to see the HTTP response. Also MsDeploy also creates IIS logs in inetpub/logs which should give you some clue if you're having connectivity problems.
