MSDeploy 1-click publish not working from VS2010

Question

We are working towards automated deployments and I was really exited about using MSdeploy to help get us there. Unfortunately, I have been having no luck with getting MS deploy to work with VS2010 and I am about to give up.

Our Win 2008 server is in the datacenter and I have the firewall and MS deploy remote service and IIS Management service setup correctly as per: http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/516/configure-the-web-deployment-handler/

I have setup the IIS Manager user and checked everything, I can think off. I can even connect from our dev environment if I use IIS remote management. However when I publish from VS 2010, I get:

Error   1   Web deployment task failed.(Could not connect to the destination computer ("x.x.x.x"). On the destination computer, make sure that Web Deploy is installed and that the required process ("The Web Management Service") is started.)
The requested resource does not exist, or the requested URL is incorrect.
Error details:
Could not connect to the destination computer ("x.x.x.x"). On the destination computer, make sure that Web Deploy is installed and that the required process ("The Web Management Service") is started.
The remote server returned an error: (404) Not Found.       0   0   UI

What am I missing? Please help?

Answer 1

That error pops up when you aren't using the correct URL for the msdeploy service. It should look something like this:

http://x.x.x.x:80/MsDeployAgentService

The: /MsDeployAgentService is the default path that msdeploy uses.

Other things to try: 1. Turning off the firewall and see if it works. 2. validate the "web deployment service" is running in the windows service manager of the destination server.

Answer 2

@PaulLemke answer will probably be correct for a server that's been in use for some time.

But as an addendum for anyone browsing to this question - the same error is thrown if MSDeploy is simply not installed on the server - which may happen if the server is new. Oh and Troy Hunt's series of articles on deployment is well worth looking at.