How can I get TFS2010 to run MSDEPLOY for me through MSBUILD?

Question

There is an excellent PDC talk available here from Vishal Joshi which describes the new MSDEPLOY features in Visual Studio 2010 - as well as how to deploy an application wit

Answer 1

Here's the steps that finally worked for me. I wanted to get the working with RemoteAgent, but couldn't get that working no matter what I tried.

You don't have to do exactly like this, but this is how I got it working

• Configure WMSVC
• Make sure the service is started
• Configure an IIS user (click on the TOP MOST SERVERNAME in IIS) and go to 'IIS Manager Users'. I suggest making it different to your windows name.
• Make sure the user account for WMSVC (LOCAL SERVICE for me) has write permissions to the IIS directory you're using
• In my case I'm using an SSL certificate (even though it is hitting localhost).

Remember these are all arguments to MSBUILD added within the TFS Build definition

/p:DeployOnBuild=True 
/p:DeployTarget=MSDeployPublish 
/p:MSDeployPublishMethod=WMSVC 
/p:MsDeployServiceUrl=https://staging.example.com:8172/msdeploy.axd 
/p:username=sweaveriis 
/p:password=abcd1234 
/p:DeployIisAppPath=staging.example.com/virtual_directory_name
/p:AllowUntrustedCertificate=True

Note: staging.example.com is actually the local box with a hosts file entry pointing to 127.0.0.1. Localhost would probably work here too.

Useful articles:

Troubleshooting MSDeploy issues

More troubleshooting