Every example I’ve seen on how to deploy an MVC application to Windows Azure is using the Visual Studio Publish tool, my problem is that my application is deployed with a custom msbuild file (.proj).
I cannot change the way it is deployed, so is there a way to deploy to azure without publishing? Something like copying the directory result of my custom build to some azure directory.
Thanks for letting us know that it is for Windows Azure Web Role. You can use Automated Build and Deployment with Windows Azure SDK 1.6 blog to deploy directly from ccproj file. Even if it is written with SDK 1.6, you sure can use exact details with SDK 1.7 as well.
You can also take a look at Using MSBuild to deploy to multiple Windows Azure environments blog as well.