Visual Studio 2010 Web deployment task failed

Question

I am trying to use VS2010's 1-Click Publish feature to deploy a test site from my laptop to my server. I have the firewall turned off on both machines and the MS Deployment Service is up and running on both my laptop and the server.

However, when I try and publish from VS2010 on my laptop I get the following error:

Error 1 Web deployment task failed.(Remote agent (URL https://192.168.1.181/:8172/msdeploy.axd?site=LocationsTest) could not be contacted. Make sure the remote agent service is installed and started on the target computer.)
The requested resource does not exist, or the requested URL is incorrect.
Error details:
Remote agent (URL https://192.168.1.181/:8172/msdeploy.axd?site=LocationsTest) could not be contacted. Make sure the remote agent service is installed and started on the target computer.
An unsupported response was received. The response header 'MSDeploy.Response' was '' but 'v1' was expected.
The remote server returned an error: (404) Not Found. 0 0 Test.Web

Any idea what I am doing wrong here?

Answer 1

I was getting similar errors from VS 2013 and found a fix I did not see mentioned any of the other answers.

Errors:

• The underlying connection was closed
• Unable to read data from the transport connection: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host, from the build server (TFS 2010).

Fix:

The fix in my case was to re-enable TLS 1.0 on the target. It's a registry key but I am using the free IISCrypto applet for this.

Answer 2

Make sure you have the WMSvc Service (Web Management Service) set to 'Auto' (and started) so it's on when you restart & check out this link

Answer 3

I got this error because I changed my password. The deployment wizard still saved my old password, after retyped my password, everything works fine now.

Answer 4

I've installed a couple of web servers and I keep getting this issue, so I'm posting my answer here so that I find it when I Google the problem.

Basically I always install Web Deploy 3 from the Web Platform Installer. This is the first mistake. For some reason this only installs half the stuff you need. If you have installed this, uninstall it and download the Web Deploy installer. Then choose "Complete" install.

If you are following this guide

Then disregard option 1.

Start reading again from "2. Download the Web Deploy installer ..."

Answer 5

I got 404 from a IE browser from https:// servername:8172/MsDeploy.axd

But Chrome did not make trouble.

This can be the first test to see if you can reach the Web Management service on the server at all. In other words: When chome worked (it responded with a blank page), then you have hole through to the service on the server.

Still you also need to have permission to deploy to the specific site. In IIS find the site and do that in "IIS Manager Permissions" under Management.

Answer 6

Restart visual studio.

I've had this one come up on a few occasions after having just successfully deployed a WebApp on a server running IIS 7.5. Obviously since a deployment/publishing was done successfully on the server just before this error came up, there was very little that could have gone wrong on the server setup/configuration (unless the previous successful deployment did something horribly wrong and removed some configuration parameters on the server).

After having rebooted the server, checked that Web Management service and Web Deployment service were running correctly, and verified from cUrl tool that a GET of the MsDeploy.axd was successful there was only one thing left to do. Restart Visual Studio. Magically post restart of VS publish started working again. All on its own. Magical stuff, this Web Deployment :)