Web Deploy is one of the mechanisms to publish websites to IIS from Visual Studio. You can utilize this mechanism to publish from Visual Studio, TFS or manually if you have existing website packaged as a zip file.  If you haven’t checked this gem of resources (Vishal Joshi's Blog) on web deploying and publishing then please do yourself a favor.  In this post I am going to talk about a checklist to make sure before you wish to publish site to IIS hosting.  Here is the list:

Installed the latest Web Deploy on windows server (Check this IIS website).

- Web Management Service is started and running

- Web Deployment Agent Service started and running

- Created a website inside IIS and created application pool for it.

- Given the user IIS Manager Permissions at the site level inside IIS

- Configured website for Web Deploy publishing

- Saved Web publish settings on a local desktop

- Import Web publish settings from the local desktop from Visual Studio publish dialog

- Publish url is over Https 

- Checked connectivity to the site from the Visual Studio publish dialog 

Now before you jump on to the TFS side of things to publish, please make sure that you have done following things:

- Team Foundation Server Build service account is added to IIS Manager Permission section for the website inside IIS

- Able to publish successfully from visual studio using web deploy?

- Check the MSBuild parameters for web deploy (I have provided what works for me below).

If you have some more checklist you have formed over the years then let me know I will add to this list.

What-If-Error
When you click publish from visual studio you will have to select a publish method and at that point select Web Deploy.  You have the option to import the profile you have created from that publish dialog.  This will pre-populate all the details.  You will have to provide the user name and password for the user who has the permission in IIS Manager Permissions as described in earlier.  At this point if you see any errors then this is a nice website where all the errors are listed.  I think you will see these errors only if you do some mistake while manually typing out the details in the publish dialog.  I haven’t found any issues if you import site details through import mechanism.
Here are TFS MSBuild parameters I use to publish a website from TFS to IIS7.
/p:DeployOnBuild=True
/p:DeployTarget=MsDeployPublish
/p:CreatePackageOnPublish=True
/p:MSDeployPublishMethod=WMSVC
/p:MSDeployServiceUrl=https://ServerName:8172/MSDeploy.axd /p:DeployIisAppPath="NameofWebsiteOnIISServer"
/p:AllowUntrustedCertificate=True
/p:UserName="domain\serviceaccount"
/p:Password="AwesomeSecurePassword"

If you are still unsuccessful in publishing the website from TFS Build then it could be that your TFS Build server is 2010 and you are using Visual Studio 2012 and it might be missing some binaries.  If you install Visual Studio 2012 on the build server then this issue could be resolved.

With IIS 7 url rewriting and redirecting has never been easier thanks to Microsoft’s Url Rewrite module. The rewriting is done by rules which are specified in the web.config under <system.webserver> element. Using IIS Manager you can use the Url Rewrite gui to create and maintain your rules.

You can also just put the rules directly into the web.config without using the gui. For example:

<system.webserver>
 <rewrite>
 <rules>
 <rule name="xyz">...blah...</rule>
 </rules>
 <rewrite>
</system.webserver>

IIS 7 Url Rewrite WWW

One of the most common needs for SEO is to force your site to use www for all page requests so that search engines will go to www.mydomain.com instead of domain.com. This is very easy to do with IIS 7′s Url Rewrite. Here is the rule:

<rewrite>
<rules>
<rule name=”Redirect to www” patternSyntax=”Wildcard” stopProcessing=”true”>  
<match url=”*” />
<conditions>
<add input=”{HTTP_HOST}” pattern=”abc.com” />
  </conditions>
 <action type=”Redirect” url=”http://www.abc.com/{R:0}” />
</rule>
</rules>
<rewrite>

This works really well and it is a completely seamless experience for your web site visitors.  Here is how the rule looks in the IIS Manager gui.

IIS 7 Url Rewrite HTTP to HTTPS

Probably the 2nd most common use of Url Rewrite is for sites that have SSL certificates installed and need to seamlessly redirect page requests using the certificate for either the entire site or a particular folder. Here is the Url Rewrite rule for redirecting requests on the entire site. You simply detect if the request is not secure and then redirect to the secure channel:

<rewrite>
 <rules>
 <rule name="HTTP Redirect to HTTPS" enabled="true" stopProcessing="true">
 <match url="(.*)" ignoreCase="false" />
 <conditions>
 <add input="{HTTPS}" pattern="off" />
 </conditions>
 <action type="Redirect" url="https://{HTTP_HOST}/{R:1}" appendQueryString="true" redirectType="Permanent" />
 </rule>
 </rules>
 </rewrite>

IIS 7 Url Rewrite HTTP to HTTPS on Subfolder

The example above is great but running your entire site in HTTPS will have a performance impact so you don’t need to do it unless there is a specific business requirement for it. So then we need a rule to redirect requests to HTTPS for just one folder. In this example we’ll use a folder called “/secure”. In this instance we use the same rule as above however now we only want page requests for the “secure” folder. This is done by modifying the “match url” element.

<rewrite>
 <rules>
  <rule name="HTTPS on subfolder" enabled="true">
         <match url="(^secure/.*)" ignoreCase="false" />
         <conditions>
             <add input="{HTTPS}" pattern="off" />
         </conditions>
         <action type="Redirect" url="https://{HTTP_HOST}/{R:1}" appendQueryString="true" redirectType="Permanent" />
     </rule>
 <rules>
 <rewrite>

We’ve covered 3 of the most common uses of IIS 7 Url Rewrite but if you notice the rules above are really for redirecting and not url rewriting.