Web Deploy enables developers to quickly push incremental changes to a web role running in Windows Azure during development and testing. Changes are made directly on the target role without creating and deploying a new package (.cspack). This is a great way to tweak your code and configuration in the cloud before creating the final package that you deploy to your production environment.

 There are a number of constraints regarding the use of Web Deploy:

• Your web role must only have a single running instance.
•  The changes that you make with Web Deploy are temporary. When the role instance is restarted, your changes will be gone.
• Can only be used for development and testing. Not intended for updating applications in production.

You can download the SDK refresh using the Web Platform Installer:

The Visual Studio Tools for Windows Azure have built in support for enabling Web Deploy. The tools also automatically create a publish profile so you can make incremental updates using the web application publish wizard.

When you install the Web Deploy plug-in a new option will appear in the Cloud Tools publish dialog with the title “Enable Web Deploy for all Web Roles (requires Remote Desktop)”:

In order to enable the feature you must first setup remote desktop. Follow the instructions here to set up remote desktop. Once remote desktop is enabled, you can set the check mark to enable Web Deploy.

Notice: Web Deploy is set up to use a self-signed certificate for SSL encryption by default. You can change the certificate in the IIS Manager on the web role.

Now publish your Windows Azure project as usual. That is all you have to do to enable Web Deploy from Visual Studio. Under the covers Visual Studio will include the Web Deploy plug-in and define an input endpoint in the ServiceDefinition. These changes are made as a part of the publish process and do not affect your design time files.

Once deployment is complete, right click on the Web Application Project and choose “Publish”:

The Cloud Tools automatically created a publish profile with the right settings for you:

Web Deploy uses the same credentials as Remote Desktop. Type your password and click “Publish”. Web Deploy will now update your Web Role instance in a fraction of the time it normally takes to re-deploy to Windows Azure.

Happy Web Deploying...

Changing Web Deploy port number

By default Web Deploy uses the Web Management port number 8172. In most cases this is fine. However, in some IT environments it is not possible to make SSL connections using this port. In such cases you will have to customize Web Deploy to use a different port. The Visual Studio Cloud Tools can be configured to setup the input endpoint for Web Deploy to a custom port number. Ask your IT department if they can recommend a port number. Otherwise you can configure Web Deploy to use port 443 which is the standard SSL port and therefore open in most environments. To manually configure the port number, you have to edit the cloud project file (.ccproj) by hand.

1) Unload the project:

2) Edit the project file:

3) Add this setting to the project properties (replace 'WebRole1' with the name of your web role): <WebDeployPorts>WebRole1:443</WebDeployPorts>

You can add multiple Web Roles by separating them with '|' in the project setting: <WebDeployPorts>WebRole1:443|WebRole2:444</WebDeployPorts>

4) Reload the project and deploy the cloud project to Windows Azure

Troubleshooting Web Deploy for Windows Azure

Here are some of the most common problems with Web Deploy on Windows Azure:

Symptom: I get this error message when I try to update my Web Role instance using Web Deploy:

"Error : Web deployment task failed. (...) The response header 'MSDeploy.Response' was '' but 'v1' was expected."

Problem 1: In some IT Environments it is not possible to make SSL connections on port 8172, which is the default port for Web Deploy and the Web Management Service.

Solution 1: Change the Web Deploy port number. (see above)

Problem 2: The Web Deploy service isn’t running correctly on the Web Role instance.

Solution 2: Log into the Web Role instance with Remote Desktop and make sure that the Web Management Service and Web Deploy Service are both running. Try to restart both services.

Symptom: I checked the Web Deploy checkbox when I published my Cloud Project but there is no publish profile in my Web Application project.

Problem: In some cases the publish profile gets deleted in Visual Studio 2010 RTM.

Solution: This problem is solved in Visual Studio 2010 SP1.

The Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio extends Visual Studio 2010 to enable the creation, configuration, building, debugging, running, packaging and deployment of scalable web applications and services on Windows Azure.

 New in this release:

• IIS Support: Full IIS is supported for building and deploying web roles, both in the development environment and in Windows Azure.
•  Remote Desktop: Support to enable and configure Remote Desktop connections for all your roles in the Windows Azure project;
• Virtual Machine (VM) Role: Allow you to add a VM role to your Windows Azure project, select the VHD for your VM role, configure and deploy the VM role;
• Virtual Network:  Support to activate Windows Azure Connect for your roles, to provide connection between Azure and on-premise resources;
• Diagnostics: Updated support for diagnostics to use the new plug-In;
• EndPoints Support Enhancements: Refreshed support for Endpoints according to platform update.

The Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio extend Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2008 to enable the creation, configuration, building, debugging, running, packaging and deployment of scalable web applications and services on Windows Azure.

New for this release:

• Visual Studio 2010 RTM Support: Full support for Visual Studio 2010 RTM.
• .NET 4 support: Choose to build services targeting either the .NET 3.5 or .NET 4 framework.
• Cloud storage explorer: Displays a read-only view of Windows Azure tables and blob containers through Server Explorer.
• Integrated deployment: Deploy services directly from Visual Studio by selecting ‘Publish’ from Solution Explorer.
• Service monitoring: Keep track of the state of your services through the ‘compute’ node in Server Explorer.
• IntelliTrace support for services running in the cloud: Adds support for debugging services in the cloud by using the Visual Studio 2010 IntelliTrace feature. This is enabled by using the deployment feature, and logs are retrieved through Server Explorer. Note: Requires Visual Studio Ultimate and .NET 4 roles.

QFE to enable IntelliTrace on 32-Bit OS.

https://blogs.msdn.com/jnak/archive/2010/02/08/migrating-an-existing-asp-net-app-to-run-on-windows-azure.aspx

This release supports VS 2008 and the upcoming VS 2010 RC.  For VS 2010 Beta 2 please use the November 2009 release.

New for version 1.1:

• Windows Azure Drive: Enable a Windows Azure application to use existing NTFS APIs to access a durable drive. This allows the Windows Azure application to mount a page blob as a drive letter, such as X:, and enables easy migration of existing NTFS applications to the cloud.
• OS Version Support: Allows a Windows Azure application to choose the appropriate Guest OS to run on in the cloud.
• Bug Fixes
  • StorageClient: Expose account key from storage credentials, expose continuation tokens for pagination, and reduce maximum buffer size for parallel uploads.
  • Windows Azure Diagnostics: Fix path corruption for crash dumps, OnDemandTransfer now respects LogLevelFilter.
  • VS 2010: Improved packaging performance.
  • VS 2010: Support for linked files in Web projects.
  • VS 2010: Support for ASP.NET web project web.config transformations.
  • Certificate selection lists certificates from LocalMachine\My instead of CurrentUser\My.
  • Right click on Role under Roles folder to select whether to launch the browser against HTTP, HTTPS or not at all.

Updated and additional samples are available at: https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsazuresamples