VS2013 Web Deploy Replace from Server error

Question

I have deployed web applications using web deploy on to iis7.5 without issues, the preview works and It updates only the necessary files when publishing again. We have designers who like to change the css files with FTP and I thought the Replace fileName from server commands in Visual Studio would be great to pull their changes into TFS.

Every time I run it it comes up with the error :

The synchronization is being stopped because the maximum number of sync passes '5' has been exceeded even though all the changes could not be applied. This could occur if there are external changes being made to the destination.

If anyone could shine some light on the error or some documentation regarding this feature, that would be great.

Answer 1

Web Deploy does at least 2 passes to do a remote sync (when either the client or server is remote which is in your case too). At the end of these passes, web deploy does a metadata check to see if all the files are in sync.

If by then other changes have happened (such as someone else started a web deploy sync to the same destination, or a few files were edited via the web or via ftp or any other means) then web deploy will attempt a 3rd pass to get them in sync with the source. If the changes keep happening the passes will keep happening.

But since we dont want to sync the content for ever we placed a max retry limit of 5. You can actually override to something higher but its not recommended.

Update: You can set this in two ways:

• pass in a flag -retryAttempts=7 (or any number) to msdeploy from command line

• Set RetryAttemptsForDeployment in VS targets or use it as an MSBuild property. Its described here