Why doesn't my Azure virtual machine show up in Visual Studio's Publish feature, for an ASP.NET MVC app?

Question

I\'m trying to publish my ASP.NET MVC4 web application, using Visual Studio 2013, to a virtual machine that I have up and running in Azure. The virtual machine has IIS insta

Answer 1

The reason the VM does not appear in the Select dropdown list is probably because:

1. web deploy is not setup on your VM that is already provisioned on Azure, or
2. not allowed through firewall for inbound connection or
3. the web management service is not started or
4. it is a windows 8 or 8.1 system
5. [Update] You have an outdated version of Azure SDK (This was the issue in my case). Get The latest Azure SDK Here: http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/
6. OR Download it using Visual Studio itself from Menu option Tools > Extensions and Updates (assuming you are using VS 2013)

The following article describes all the steps to setup web deploy publishing on a windows server system: Troubleshooting Web Deploy problems with Visual Studio

The following article describes Web Deploy cannot be setup with Windows 8 or 8.1 system. Installing and Configuring Web Deploy on IIS 8.0 or Later

Hope this helps someone.