The web publishing extension is not installed which is required to publish

Question

I was tring to deploy an ASP.NET Web Application to a Windows Azure Web Site by following the tutorial through this link: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/tutorials/get-started/ After download the public profile, which is a ".PublishSettings" file, I go back to Visual Studio and right-click the project in Solution Explorer and select Publish from the context menu as the tutorial said. However, a warning box jumped up and it showed me that "The Web Publishing extension is not installed which is required to publish. You can install it from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=208120."

I already installed "Windows Azure SDK for .NET (VS 2012)" and I also tried to uninstall this and install again, but the same problem is still there.

Anyone knows how to solve this? I am really appreciated.

Answer 1

I ran into 2 issues, which were related. One was the web publishing extension is not installed which is required to publish, and the other was the web extension package did not load.

I'm upvoting and reposting user3918092's solution for others who run into this issue and do everything including:

1. Deleting the ComponentModelCache out of
   C:\Users\...\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0 and
   C:\Users\...\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0
2. Repairing Azure SDK 2.4 and VS2013U3 Uninstalling and reinstalling both Azure SDK 2.4 and VS2013U3
3. Removing extensions from the solution
4. Ignoring the extensions on VS startup
5. Using devenv /setup and devenv /updateconfiguration to try to reset the configuration

The solution is:

Reinstall the following items to your GAC using the following commands from the vs command line run as an administrator:

gacutil -i "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\Extensions\Microsoft\Web Tools\Publish\Microsoft.VisualStudio.Web.Publish.dll"  
gacutil -i "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\Extensions\Microsoft\Web Tools\Publish\Microsoft.VisualStudio.Web.Internal.Contracts.dll"

Thanks to user3918092!