Azure Web Deploy "Publish Failed"

Question

Hello my fellow developers!

I am currently struggling with a problem in the latest Visual Studio 2017 Professional - Version 15.8(.1).

Since The Update to Version 15.8, I am unable to publish any Azure Function via Web Deploy.

Every time i press the "Publish" button, I simply get an error window saying: "Publish failed". The Output window stays empty, where normally I would get all the build and publishing output.

What I've tired:

• Cleaned the solution; deleted %temp%; deleted the publishing profile; reset the publish credentials in Azure; build it all again and import a newly generated publish profile: Same Error
• Uninstalled VS2017; Cleaned all remains; Reinstalled VS2017: Same Error
• Checked our Firewall, if anything gets blocked and even tried an exception for my workstation to allow all traffic: Same Error
• Tried publishing from a physically different Network: Same Error
• Stop the Function in the azure portal prior to publishing: Same Error
• In the azure portal: Delete an create a new and empty azure function to publish to: Same Error
• In the azure portal: Set the 'Function app edit mode' to Read/Write: Same Error
• Tried to hit the functions Endpoint-URL in the browser. No Problem.
• Tried to publish from a colleagues workstation with Visual Studio 2017 Pro Version 15.7.1: Works fine - as used to

My Questions:

• Am I missing something? Is there anything else I can try except installing an older version of Visual Studio, which would be my next step.
• Could this be a bug in the latest Azure Tools or even Visual Studio?
• Why is my Output window not giving me any information to address the failing publishing attempt? Am I missing some new option to activate this again?

I hope someone can point me in the right direction to solve this infuriating issue ;)

Answer 1

I think the problem is that when you install the visual studio update, it changes the runtime version, and when you try to deploy it fails because of this.

I ran into this problem myself and I found that when I manually created a new publishing profile through visual studio, it would then give me a prompt which advised that "The remote Azure Functions runtime version needs to be updated", click on yes and it will update the runtime and deploy.

I wrote about this on my blog here: https://cosmicdistortion.wordpress.com/2018/09/06/azure-functions-web-deployment-fails-after-visual-studio-update-to-version-15-8/