Question

I’m currently running Visual Studio Team System 2010 RC and I’m trying to get the Build Service setup to build my solution and deploy 3 web applications in it. I’ve created a custom build configuration called Integration and I’ve setup the “IIS Web site/application name to use on the destination server” on the Package/Publish tab of the Properties for each of the web applications.

In my Build Definition I’ve set the following arguments:

/p:DeployOnBuild=True /p:DeployTarget=MSDeployPublish /p:MSDeployPublishMethod=InProc /p:MsDeployServiceUrl=http://my-server-name:8172/msdeploy.axd /p:EnablePackageProcessLoggingAndAssert=True

However, when I run the build I get the following error, for all three web applications:

Updating setAcl (MyProjectName).

C:\Program Files\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\Web\Microsoft.Web.Publishing.targets(3481,5): error : Web deployment task failed. (Attempted to perform an unauthorized operation.)

I don’t think this is my actual problem though. This error is occuring after the following entry in the log: Updating setAcl
This is what’s causing the error message, but it appears that MSDeploy is trying to deploy to the local IIS on the Build server, not the server I specified with the MsDeployServiceUrl parameter.

After looking at the targets file at C:\Program Files\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\Web\Microsoft.Web.Publishing.targets, I added the EnablePackageProcessLoggingAndAssert, which adds extra logging. The log shows an emptry string for the value of MsDeployServiceUrl. I also noticed in the target that MsDeployServiceUrl has a lowercase s, which is somewhat confusing because the task name MSDeployPublish has an uppercase S. I tried using it using uppercase, then again using lowercase, but neither worked.

A couple other things to note:

1. My build service is running as
   NETWORK SERVICE.
2. The server I’m
   trying to deploy to is on another
   domain.
3. I also tried adding
   /p:username=mydomain\myusername
   /p:password=mypassword to the MSBuild paramter list, but that didn’t help.

Does anyone know if I’m supplying the correct parameters? Or provide me with the correct ones?

Thanks

Answer 1

After many rounds of changing the parameters, I was able to find a solution and get the build to deploy successfully. The parameters that I ended up using were:

/p:DeployOnBuild=True
/p:DeployTarget=MSDeployPublish 
/p:MSDeployPublishMethod=**RemoteAgent** 
/p:MsDeployServiceUrl=http://my-server-name
/p:username=myusername 
/p:password=mypassword

It appears that when using InProc for the MSDeployPublishMethod MSBuild ignores MsDeployServiceUrl and always tries to deploy to the local server. I changed it to RemoteAgent and it deployed successfully. I did notice that the Package file is nolonger contained in the MyWebApplication_Package folder, but that isn’t a big deal to me.