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.

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Internet Information Services (IIS) 8.5 is an extensible web server created by Microsoft for use with Windows NT family. IIS 8.5 is included in Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1. This version includes Idle worker-Process page-out, Dynamic Site Activation, Enhanced Logging, ETW logging, and Automatic Certificate Rebind.

IIS 8.5 has several improvements related to performance in large-scale scenarios, such as those used by commercial hosting providers and Microsoft's own cloud offerings. It also has several added features related to logging and troubleshooting. The new features are:

• Idle worker-Process page-out – a function to suspend idle site to reduce the memory footprint of idle sites. In IIS 8.5, the Administrator has the option of suspending an idle worker process rather than terminating it. A suspended worker process remains alive but is paged-out to disk, reducing the system resources it consumes. When a user accesses the site again, the worker process wakes up from suspension and is quickly available.
• Dynamic Site Activation – a feature that registers listening queues only to sites that have received requests.
• Enhanced Logging – Now you can customize the logging to store request headers, response headers and server variables. The customization can be used to get information such as the IP addresses of connecting clients when the network has a load balance.
• ETW logging – Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) provides application programmers the ability to start and stop event tracing sessions, instrument an application to provide trace events, and consume trace events. Trace events contain an event header and provider-defined data that describes the current state of an application or operation. You can use the events to debug an application and perform capacity and performance analysis.
• Automatic Certificate Rebind – a feature that detects when a site certificate has been renewed, and automatically rebinds the site to it