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

For me the problem was that Web Deployment Agent Service was not started.

A simple net start msdepsvc fixed it. You could also set startup mode to Automatic on this service.

The arguments I'm using are:

/p:DeployOnBuild=True 
/p:DeployTarget=MsDeployPublish 
/p:MSDeployPublishMethod=RemoteAgent 
/p:MSDeployServiceUrl=stagingserver 
/p:DeployIisAppPath=test.local 
/p:UserName=

You only need to specify the server name, and not the full path (no http needed).

Note that UserName is left empty to work around a bug with NTLM authentication (this way it uses the credentials of the TFS build agent for the deployment). see the accepted answer here