VS2015: The components for communicating with FTP

Question

I have been using Visual Studio 2010 Pro for my vb.net desktop application development. I publish the apps via clickonce to a web server with ftp. My settings look like this:

Publishing folder location: ftp://www.webaddress.com/folder/

Installation folder : http://webaddress.com/folder/

This works perfect in VS2010.

I am now trying to upgrade to Visual Studio 2015 community edition. When I try to publish my app, I get the error "The components for communicating with FTP servers are not installed". I am getting this error on both computers I have installed VS2015 on.

Strangely enough, there isn't much info on this error. The only solution I've seen is to repair the installation. I did this but still a no go.. Another cause I read about is having Xamarin installed, but I have never had that installed.

Has anybody run into this and know what the fix is??

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EDIT:

It appears to not actually have anything to do with installed components. After I posted this question, I realized the publish via FTP had worked earlier on a little sample Hello World project i made (brain fart). It was only once I loaded my existing project that this error started showing up.

I closed the solution, created another simple project, and still got the error. I closed visual studio, reopened the sample project, and ftp worked! I then opened my existing project and ftp worked there too?! So I don't know what the trigger is, and I haven't had it fail again yet, but maybe this info will help figure out what is causing the failure.

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EDIT (3/30/2017)

Just an update - I am still having this issue. This issue happens on visual studio 2013, 2015, and 2017. I have tried reinstalling the c++ redistributable, still nothing. It seems others are having this issue with a web project but mine is a desktop app publishing with clickonce via FTP. It must be something to do with solution I am working on that was originally created in 2010, as the issue is not present in any other project.

Answer 1

This is a total work around, but I've noticed I get this error every time I open my app (that originated in VS2010) and try to publish without first opening a sample app. I created a new project and published it to my FTP server. When I receive this error, I close Visual studio, reopen and the open the sample project, publish that app, then open my real app. The publish then works.

This works every time, and seems to be a bug in Visual studio, and probably has something to do with the fact that my app was originally built in 2010.

Maybe this will help somebody else with the same issue. It's a big pain so hopefully MS gets a fix in for this.

Answer 2

I had the same problem with Visual Studio 2015. And Publish used to work fine so I went going crazy looking for and trying different solutions. Then I read on another thread of doing a Setup-> Repair (submitted by Erikest). I did a Setup->Repair and the publish process now works! I think it's also possible that the Repair not only did the trick on the FTP components but also replaced the C++ redistributable (often mentioned as a solution to this problem),

Answer 3

After many successful website publishes with Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition, we experienced the "components for communicating with ftp servers are not installed" issue. :(

First attempt at resolution was uninstalling VS Community 2015, then installing VS Community 2017. Received the same error: "components for communicating with ftp servers are not installed" when attempting to publish our business website.

With some work, we found that by uninstalling Microsoft Web Deploy and re-installing, this seemed to fix the problem. We can now use Visual Studio > Publish function to our ftp without problems.

See this link for download of Microsoft Web Deploy components.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=43717

Dont know what broke this VS IDE functionality, but hope this fix helps some.

Answer 4

I had the same issue here, I was using the Publish right click option on the project, which had been working fine. What fixed it for me was going back through the publish options and re-testing the connection. Publish seemed to work after that. Maybe it forgot a password or settings?

I also installed the x86 C++ Redistribution Package.

Hope this helps someone who is in the same boat.

Answer 5

I had the same issue in Visual Studio 2015 / Update 3. It was resolved after installing the 32-bit version of Visual C++ Redistributable Packages for Visual Studio 2013 (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40784)

See also https://github.com/aspnet/Tooling/issues/748

Answer 6

I had the same issue with Visual Studio 2017. What fixed it for me was to start the Visual Studio Installer and install the ".NET Core cross-platform development" workload.