VS 2013 hangs when publishing website to Azure cloud service

Question

I have a website in C# Visual Studio 2013, which was developed by another developer and is hosted on Azure cloud service. Whenever I make any changes and try to publish, Visual Studio hangs and I can't publish it. It is not showing any error message. Besides that I can successfully deploy it by building it, but as it's taking too much time and also costs money to client (as VS Team Services only provides monthly 60 minutes of free build, after that clients get charged for extra minutes). I am using following steps for publishing and it's works fine but after publishing starts Visual Studio hangs and is unresponsive.

The steps to publish the website are as follows:

1) Open the solution in visual studio.

2) Right click on the azure project in the solution explorer, and select publish.

3) The first step in the wizard is to sign in, make sure to select your credentials.

4) The next step is settings, make sure environment is set to production and build configuration is set to release, then click next.

5) The final step is a summary, simply click the publish button.

I am very new to Azure so let me know if I need to make any setting during set up my project.

Answer 1

I hit the same problem after installing the 2.8 SDK and tools. After checking out these answers I still had the problem, but found a solution.

Right click the Azure project in the VS2013 solution explorer, open project properties. Go to the application tab, and there's an "Upgrade" button to upgrade the project to the latest SDK. That did the trick for me.

Answer 2

It sounds like you are doing the right steps to deploy using the wizard. However I don't have enough information to know what would cause this to hang. There are some documentation details about the wizard that might help? https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/hh535756.aspx

There are other ways to deploy to Azure, which may solve the issue. You can for example download a publish settings profile, and use this to deploy instead of the wizard. Details here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/avkashchauhan/archive/2012/05/10/downloading-windows-azure-publish-settings-subscription-configuration-file.aspx

Or you can deploy continuously from Git - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/web-sites-publish-source-control/#Step75

Both solutions will require some tinkering in the Azure portal or getting in with PowerShell but there's a lot of ways to deploy.

Answer 3

Doing these two things fixed it for me, not sure which:

• Clean build
• Server Explorer > (Had to re-enter Azure credentials)

VS2013 update 5.