Comments on: How to publish a web site with MSBuild

By: MSBuild by jayempee - Pearltrees

MSBuild by jayempee - Pearltrees — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 12:06:44 +0000

[...] How to publish a web site with MSBuild – Coding Cockerel In part two of my MSBuild tutorial I needed to find a way to call Visual Studio’s Publish Web Site feature from MSBuild. Much trawling of the interweb failed to find anything of use, so in the end I had to produce my own target which copied the relevant files into the output folder. The problem with this approach is that it only works for files of type dll, aspx or config. [...]

By: Todd W. Powers

Todd W. Powers — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 01:29:09 +0000

I was struggling with the same error (MSB4057: The target “_CopyWebApplication” does not exist in the project.

Yes. I was using a Web Application Project (not a web site).

I was baffled because I had one project that worked, and one that did not. So I sat down with ExamDiffPro and went to work comparing the project files. What I found was the section of build target includes at the bottom of the project files were different.

One project (that was working) was created using a newer version of Visual Studio. The other one (that was NOT working) was created years ago and has been upgraded over the years, to the current version I am working with. The upgraded project, evidently didn’t get upgraded with the new build targets as newer versions of Visual Studio became available.

At the bottom of the project file which was working, I found the following:

The second import line was NOT in the project which was causing problems.

I simply copied the import from the working file, and pasted it in the relative location in the non-working file, and viola!

While this is not a direct solution to the initial problem defined in this thread, I hope this helps some of the other people that stumbled across this thread, looking for similar issues, only with actual Web Application Projects.

By: Peter de Witte

Peter de Witte — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 07:12:47 +0000

Another approach can be: Ad a Web Deployment Project to your solution. Building it will do a pretty good job publishing your webapp.

By: Deployment web site Zip with MsBuild and TeamCity | Climens Codelog

Deployment web site Zip with MsBuild and TeamCity | Climens Codelog — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 10:09:37 +0000

[...] How to publish a web site with MsBuild [...]

By: Johannes Hansen

Johannes Hansen — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 14:54:49 +0000

@The Earl: I’ve just tried that command and I don’t know if it was because I didn’t set “_PackageTempDir” to something but after a while the build started deleting files all over the place. So be very careful using that command!!!

By: The Earl

The Earl — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 16:07:36 +0000

You can emulate the publish web project menu command by calling the built in ‘PipelinePreDeployCopyAllFilesToOneFolder’ target.

MSBuild /T:Clean;Build;PipelinePreDeployCopyAllFilesToOneFolder
/p:_PackageTempDir=;Configuration=Release

I lost days of my life looking for that one

By: Dyadenka

Dyadenka — Mon, 17 May 2010 16:49:13 +0000

Sounds quite familiar, usually there is never enough time to catch up with all things . Just a small correction – seems like it’s not _CopyWebApplication target that is buggy but rather ResolveReferences one.

By: codingcockerel

codingcockerel — Mon, 17 May 2010 13:59:19 +0000

hi Dyadenka, yes you’re right the article is a bit out of date. One of these days I will get time to rewrite it using the latest tools, and all the useful comments people have provided over the last two years.

By: Dyadenka

Dyadenka — Mon, 17 May 2010 11:06:35 +0000

Hi, nice article, however you may want to update it with Ben’s comment about bug in _CopyWebApplication target. I was fighting that for a few hours until I looked under the article and stumbled upon Ben’s comment.

If you reference 3-rd party assembly (e.g. NHibernate.dll) which in turn depends on some other assembly (e.g. Castle.Core.dll, Iesi.Collections.dll) those third level dependency assemblies are not copied without workaround suggested in that Connect issue that Ben is referring to.

By: Ajeeth

Ajeeth — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 08:00:43 +0000

Output