Visual Studio 2012 Web Publish doesn t copy files

Question

I have a Web Application project in VS 2012 and when I use the web publishing tool it builds successfully but doesn t copy any files to the publish target  File System in this case    If I look at the build output I can see everything gets copied over to obj Release Package PackageTmp  correctly but then all I see in the build output is this      4 Done building project   Project  csproj     4 Deleting existing files      4 Publishing folder        4             Build  3 succeeded  0 failed  1 up-to-date  0 skipped                         Publish  1 succeeded  0 failed  0 skipped              Even though it says the publish succeeded there are not files in the target directory for the publish   I have seen this in multiple projects and sometimes it seems like the Solution Platform configurations cause this problem but I haven t been able to pinpoint an exact cause for this   Has anyone else seen this happening or have an idea on how to get this working correctly   UPDATE   I may have found a workaround for this   I just had this happen again and I was messing around with the publish settings   Once I changed the selected Configuration on the Settings tab away to another configuration and then back to the one I wanted to use all my files started publishing again   Hopefully this works on other projects in the future    UPDATE 2   I posted a bug on Microsoft Connect and heard back from a developer on the VS Web Developer team   He said they have fixed this issue in their internal builds and will releasing an update to the publish tool soon that will fix this problem   UPDATE 3   This has been recently fixed with Visual Studio 2012 Update 2

User · Answer

I have  had  the same problem for several projects  The only ones hit seem to be web projects  Deleting and recreating the profile solves the problem only once  Additionaly  comparing the publishxml generated yields no differences  so it does not seem related to the profile at all   The workaround mentioned by OP to change build problems back and forth seems the only reliable solution at this time

User · Answer

I finally found the answer by myself  All of the above solutions doesnt work for me    What i had done is that i move the project to drive c change the project folder to something shorter and boom it publish    the reason that it failed on my side is that i had very long project name heirarchy   C  Users user Desktop Compliance Management System ComplianceIssueManagementSystem ComplianceIssueManagementSystem  I had thought of this because sometimes when i extracted rar file it says that the name path is too long  I thought it will be the same as visual studio 2012 publish  and it does   hope it will help you guys

User · Answer

FIXED - various solutions offered didn t work for me  What did work for me with VS Community 2017  Windows Server 2012 R2 was to change the TEMP and TMP environmental variables for the user and then restart the system and deploy again  restarting VS was not enough   These temp variables are where VS does the temp publish         Restarting visual studio after changing temp variables didn t do the trick  had to reboot system

User · Answer

For what it s worth  I eventually gave up on fighting with Web Deploy to get it to do what I wanted  copy deployable files and nothing else   so I scripted it in PowerShell and am really happy with the result  It s much faster than anything I tried through MSBuild Web Publish  presumably because those methods were still doing things I didn t need   Here s the gist  literally    function copy-deployable-web-files  proj path   deploy dir        copy files where Build Action    Content      proj dir   split-path -parent  proj path    xml  xml   get-content  proj path    xml Project ItemGroup          Content            Include                         from     proj dir          to   split-path -parent   deploy dir         if    test-path  to     md  to       cp  from  to          copy everything in bin   cp   proj dir bin   deploy dir -recurse     In my case I m calling this in a CI environment  TeamCity   but it could easily be hooked into a post-build event as well

User · Answer

The following worked for me   Simply change from Release Debug Release  or vice-versa  and then publish    No need for deleting  editing  publishing anything you don t need to

User · Answer

I encountered this with Visual Studio generated Service Reference files becoming too long in terms of the overall path length   Shortened them by re-generating the Service Reference using svcutil exe  deleting all the original Service Reference files   svcutil can be called like this    C  Program Files  x86  Microsoft SDKs Windows v8 0A bin NETFX 4 0 Tools SvcUtil exe   language CS http   myservice  namespace   My Namespace   My Namespace should be replaced with the existing namespace in the generated service proxy  typically found in the Reference cs file  to avoid compilation errors    http   myservice should be replaced with the service endpoint url

User · Answer

In Visual Studio 2012  switching between releases still causes problems    We added a pre-build event to delete the obj folder  del  s  f  q   ProjectDir  obj and it fixed the issue of publishing  Cleaning works sometimes  but not always

User · Answer

I have a Web Application with several other referenced Projects in the Solution  I ve deployed successfully with a single Publish configuration many times in the past  I changed the Project Configuration from Debug to Release for a Project that had been missed in the past  The next time I attempted to deploy I got these symptoms  where the Publish just quietly fails - it does nothing and says it succeeded   1 gt ------ Build started  Project  Project  Configuration  DeployProduction Any CPU ------ 1 gt    2 gt Publishing folder                 Build  1 succeeded  0 failed  9 up-to-date  0 skipped                       Publish  1 succeeded  0 failed  0 skipped              The only way to recover it was to wipe out the Publish profile  close Visual Studio to force it to save the deletion  reopen it  and recreate the Publish profile from scratch  Once I did that I could Publish fine again   Win8 VS2012  crappy laptop

User · Answer

Follow these steps to resolve   Build  gt  Publish  gt  Profile  gt  New   Create a new profile and configure it with the same settings as your existing profile   The project will now publish correctly  This often occurs as a result of a source-controlled publish profile from another machine that was created in a newer version of Visual Studio

User · Answer

First    Build in release Configuration  In Project Properties-  page select All files and folders under Package Publish Web  Rebuild solution  after Clean solution   now publish    While publishing recheck what u have opted  this should do it   It did for me

User · Answer

To take this a bit further  You have two files that are created when you create a publish profile     NewProfile pubxml  NewProfile pubxml user   When you open a project that has these files in the PublishProfile folder from a source control it only has the  pubxml file and not the  publxml user file  so it creates the  publxml user file on the fly when you open the project  When it creates the new  publxml user on the fly the xml looks like    lt Project ToolsVersion  4 0  xmlns  http   schemas microsoft com developer msbuild 2003  gt   lt  Project gt    When you create a new profile it creates xml that looks like    lt Project ToolsVersion  4 0  xmlns  http   schemas microsoft com developer msbuild 2003  gt     lt PropertyGroup gt       lt LastUsedBuildConfiguration gt Release lt  LastUsedBuildConfiguration gt       lt LastUsedPlatform gt Any CPU lt  LastUsedPlatform gt       lt TimeStampOfAssociatedLegacyPublishXmlFile   gt       lt EncryptedPassword   gt     lt  PropertyGroup gt   lt  Project gt    If you take the  lt PropertyGroup gt  node and put it in the  pubxml user file your PublishProfiles will start working again

User · Answer

Here we had the same problem   We just change the  Publish method   from  File System  to for example  Web Deploy   and immediately change it back to  File System

User · Answer

Same problem with VS 2012 Pro with a disk publish target  Project used to publish correctly but started doing this issue where it failed to copy the files to the destination folder   Solution was to edit the publish profile  change the mode from Release  Any CPU  to debug then back to Release  Any CPU   Doing this causes the PublishProfiles projname pubxml user file to be rewritten  as described above   Looks like it added the LastUsedBuild LastUsedPlatform and  TimeStampOfAssociatedLegacyPublishXmlFile elements under the propertygroup node  After the publish is complete  it adds another ItemGroup with individual files and publish times

User · Answer

Check your current project that whether you have made back copy with same class name and different page name  Class name will inherit copied file    Ultimately that will confuse the compiler     CodeFile  Consolidated aspx vb  Inherits  Consolidated

User · Answer

The easiest is       1  select the file s  that are not being copied     2  Press  lt F4 gt  to get the properties window    3  Make the  Build Action  property  compile  or  content  depending on what it is     4  Now this particular file will be included

User · Answer

This may be caused by solutions projects that were created with the RC of vs2012  This happened to me months ago and fixed the problem by making sure my solution build configurations matched my project configurations     I just recently experienced the same problem when opening the same solution originally created in vs2012RC with VS2012 Express for Web  I did exactly what the original poster suggested and it fixed my problem   Here is the thread that lead me to the answer   connect microsoft com VisualStudio feedback details 746321 publish-web-application-fails  The pertinent response from the conversation above that helped me was      Posted by Microsoft on 6 13 2012 at 12 00 PM Hi Andrew       This was a bug in how we handle the solution configuration vs  the   project configuration  We incorrectly assumed that they would be the   same  e g  Solution s Release x86 would have each project set to   Release x86 as well   which caused us to use the wrong build   properties for publishing files       The workaround is to make the solution configuration and build   configuration match  This issue will be fixed in the next release of   Visual Studio 2012       Thanks    - Jimmy Lewis SDET  Visual Web Developer team

User · Answer

I had this same problem however none of the answers in this thread worked for me   My issue was that there is a directory that contains dynamically generated  by my app  static HTML files   The entire directory was not being published  The solution that worked for me was found here   One issue I got a while back and thought I should document was that certain file types were not being uploaded when I published my project  The file types in question were  pdf files and  rtf  The reason this happened was because these file extensions were not recognized as requiring publishing by Visual Studio  Luckily this can be changed in Visual Studio  Select the file s  that aren   t being copied  In Properties ensure that Build Action is set to Content  If this doesn   t work the following can be tried  Under the Project menu select Package Publish Web and notice this drop down   Try changing this to All files in this project folder

User · Answer

I ve got into same problem  None of the above solutions worked for me      So  I ve excluded the files which failed to copy while publishing

User · Answer

Try quitting Visual Studio  delete the relevant pubxml user file in your PublishProfiles directory  restart VS and publish  Worked on VS 2019

User · Answer

I had same error and I change the setting from release to debug and the problem resolved

User · Answer

My problem was in wrong configuration of myproject csproj file    address-step1-stored cshtml  file did not copy on publish   None  changed to  Content   now it s ok

User · Answer

None of the above solutions worked for me   But I noticed that of our five ASP NET MVC projects in our main solution  four of them put the deployment package in the right place  while one left it under obj Debug   I compared the projects and found a discrepancy   The solution was to change this    lt Import     Project    MSBuildExtensionsPath32  Microsoft VisualStudio v10 0 WebApplications Microsoft WebApplication targets    gt    to this    lt Import   Project    VSToolsPath  WebApplications Microsoft WebApplication targets    Condition     VSToolsPath            gt   lt Import   Project    MSBuildExtensionsPath32  Microsoft VisualStudio v10 0 WebApplications Microsoft WebApplication targets    Condition  false    gt    After I made this change  all five projects put their deployment packages in the right spot    Sorry about the long lines  but I couldn t find a better way to condense them

User · Answer

An easy fix is to delete your publish profile and create a fresh one   when you right click on your solution and select publish  you have a profile set  delete this and create a new one   this will fix it   I had this problem from switching from 2010 to 2012

User · Answer

This is because the  pubxml user contains required information to publish  and that file isn t  and shouldn t  be included in source control  To fix this VS bug  copy the information from the  pubxml user file to the  pubxml file  The relevant properties are    lt LastUsedBuildConfiguration gt Release lt  LastUsedBuildConfiguration gt   lt LastUsedPlatform gt Any CPU lt  LastUsedPlatform gt    Put those in your  pubxml and you should be good to go

User · Answer

I had published the website several times  But one day when I modified some aspx file and then tried to publish the website  it resulted in an empty published folder   On my workaround  I found a solution    The publishing wizard will reflect any error while publishing but will not copy any file to the destination folder  To find out the file that generates the error just copy the website folder contents to a new folder and start the visual studio with that website  Now when you try to publish it will give you the file name that contains errors  Just rectify the error in the original website folder and try to publish  it will work as it was earlier

User · Answer

I found the I could get around this problem by changing the target location from obj  release stage     to a new path outside of the solution folders completely eg c  deployment  It seems like VS 2012 was getting confused and maybe giving up somewhere during the publish process   Matt

User · Answer

Same problem  The workaround was changing the publish settings from Release to Debug  Re-publish and then change back to Release

User · Answer

This action was successful for me   Kill Publish Profiles in  Properties PublishProfiles xxxx pubxml  and re-setting again

User · Answer

I tried all of these solutions but this is the one that works every time     We just change the  Publish method   from  File System  to for example  Web Deploy   and immediately change it back to  File System

User · Answer

I ran into the same problem on VS 2010  after checking publish output  event logs  turning on and checking visual studio logs etc I then decided to remove the web publish  via add remove  which I believe had been recently updated to v1 0 30810 0   This resolved the problem

User · Answer

Had the same problem recently in VS 2013 for a MVC project in which I imported Umbraco CMS  I couldn t publish  The answer above helped  though I needed a while to figure out what I actually should do in VS  It needed some research e g  on MS blogs to find out  I try to say it simple    Choose in the VS toolbar a certain configuration e g  Release and Any CPU  Run the project  Afterwards right-click in the Solution Explorer on the solution in question  choose Publish  Create a new publishing profile or use a given one  but always make sure that in the settings the same configuration  e g  Release and Any CPU  is chosen  as before you run the project the last time  Additionally in my case it was necessary to delete the OBJ folder because here the settings from my last unsuccessful tries to publish got stuck  though I restarted VS and deleting all publishing profiles

[asp.net] Visual Studio 2012 Web Publish doesn't copy files

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