How to determine if MSBUILD Arguments were executed for TFS Build Definition

Question

I am using Team Foundation Service 2012, with a build controller hosted internally so I can deploy apps to our web servers. I setup the Build Definition, and am using the my Debug configuration, and have supplied the following MSBUILD arguments.

/p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:DeployTarget=MSDeployPublish /p:MSDeployPublishMethod=WMSVC /p:MSDeployServiceUrl=https://myserversname:8172/msdeploy.axd /p:AllowUntrustedCertificate=true /p:DeployIisAppPath="somesite.ourdomain.com" /p:Username=na\svc-users /p:Password=PASS /p:VisualStudioVersion=11.0

The solution builds just fine, I get no warnings, or errors. When I go my deployment server, the application is empty. I have setup the permissions to the web application folder, and inetsrv folder. I also installed/configured web deploy. If I am not getting any errors returned how can I tell what is going wrong with my Deployment? I have already checked the Event Logs on both the Build server, and the Deployment server, and neither have any errors or warnings. I can also do a publish from my dev machine and it works perfectly with the exact same parameters.

Answer 1

Copy these two folders, and their content, from your development environment to the build server:

C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v11.0\Web
C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v11.0\WebApplications

These folders are a dependency which is caused by publishing through Visual Studio 2012. This dependency is referenced in the .sln file.

Unfortunately this means web deploy is failing silently.

Alternatively you could install Visual Studio on the build server but that would be a waste of a license.