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

Silly me, I didn't have .NET 4 installed on the server

Answer 2

Although a lot of different unrelated things can contribute to getting the 404, I solved it for my by.

1. When installing/reinstalling the WebDeploy installer, choose Custom/Change and then ensure that 'Management Service Delegation UI' is one of the installed options, it is not installed by default, but is required for WebDeploy to work (installer bug).
2. Use the new Management Service Delegation icon in the Server node of the IIS manager to add the 'Deploy Applications with Content' role, accepting it's default settings. But you may also want to specify a "Run As" setting with a user that has rights to modify IIS settings.
3. Restart the Web Management Service.

After this, everything works fine. Assuming the Web Management Service is setup correctly (mine is configured to accept remote connections, the firewall port was opened, and the user I'm uploading with was added to every single Site that I want to deploy to (using the IIS Manager Permissions icon in each Site node in the IIS Manager)).

Answer 3

Make sure you have set Site/Application correctly in publish profile:

You get the same error message if you spell site or application name wrong.