Question

In Visual Studio 2012, using publish profiles along with web deploy simplifies the deployments quite a bit. However it still is missing few things or may be I don’t know how to use it yet.

• I prefer to use the NTLM authentication without storing the username and password (especially) in the publish profiles. How can this be done? If I leave the username and password empty, I am prompted for it. Is there a way like manually modifying the .pubxml files?
• Why is the username/password stored in PublishProfileName.pubxml that I have checked in the source control and not in PublishProfileName.pubxml.user that is local to each user? I could at least save the username but obviously don’t want that to be checked in.
• The Configuration itself is not part of PublishProfileName.pubxml but is stored in PublishProfileName.pubxml.user as LastUsedBuildConfiguration.
• Same for the Platform as last point.
• I am also missing support for multi-server deployments. I am currently forced to use batch files in addition to Publish Profiles.

EDIT

The command line that works fine for publishing is

MSBuild.Exe MyProject.sln /p:Configuration=QA /p:DeployOnBuild=true;PublishProfile=PublishToQA;AllowUntrustedCertificate=true /p:authType=NTLM /p:UserName=

In this I would like to omit the /p:Configuration=QA if the configuration becomes part of the publish profile itself.

Answer 1

Some answers to your questions.

• I prefer to use the NTLM authentication without storing the username and password (especially) in the publish profiles. How can
  this be done? If I leave the username and password empty, I am
  prompted for it. Is there a way like manually modifying the .pubxml
  files?

Your authentication is typically driven by how Web Deploy is hosted. By default if you are using the Web Management Service then you are using IIS users for auth. With IIS users you can control which users have permissions to specific sites/apps. You can configure WMSVC to use windows auth as well though. If you have issues using VS for those scenarios let me know.
If you are using the Remote Agent service to host Web Deploy then in this case you’ll be using windows auth.

• Why is the username/password stored in PublishProfileName.pubxml that I have checked in the source control and not in
  PublishProfileName.pubxml.user that is local to each user? I could
  at least save the username but obviously don’t want that to be checked
  in.

We have another mechanism for you to determine what information is private/shared. With the exception of the password all publish info is shared (and checked in by default). In order to simplify the design you can either have a publish profile which is shared, or one which is not shared at all. There is no in-between in which you have a profile that some fields are shared and other not. Password is special cased here and encrypted on a per-user/per-machine basis in the .pubxml.user file.

If you’d like to have a private publish profile then you can simply not check in the .pubxml file which corresponds to the publish profile. These are stored in the Properties\PublishProfiles (or My Project\PublishProfiles for VB) and just exclude them from the project and don’t check the files in. The publish dialog looks for the profiles on disk, not just the ones which are in the project. Everything should continue to work.

We don’t support the concept of selectively storing values in the .pubxml.user file. The publish dialog will only store a set number of values in that file. Instead of

• The Configuration itself is not part of PublishProfileName.pubxml but is stored in
  PublishProfileName.pubxml.user as LastUsedBuildConfiguration.
• Same for the Platform as last point.

This was a mistake it should have been stored in the .pubxml file, not the .pubxml.user file. We have since fixed this, but haven’t had a chance to release the update yet.

The Configuration property cannot be set in the publish profile. The Configuration property is a core part of the build process. To be more specific, the reason why we didn’t call this property Configuration is because the .pubxml file is imported into the definition of the .csproj/.vbproj during a build & publish. Since other properties are defined based on Configuration you cannot change the value once it’s been set. I just blogged with way too much detail on this subject at http://sedodream.com/2012/10/27/MSBuildHowToSetTheConfigurationProperty.aspx. This limitation is an MSBuild thing not a publish limitation. For command line you should specify Configuration in the following way:
msbuild.exe myproj.csproj /p:…(other properties)… /p:Configuration=

• I am also missing support for multi-server deployments. I am currently forced to use batch files in addition to Publish Profiles.

We don’t have direct support for this, but if you expand on your needs I may be able to help. FYI I have an extension which you may be interested in. I have posted a 5 min video to http://sedodream.com/2012/03/14/PackageWebUpdatedAndVideoBelow.aspx.