WebDeployproblem – error message not obvious

We have been using WebDeploy along with Beta 2 of TFS for some while. We have a local IIS installed on the WebServer and the build is taking the settings from this IIS when preparing the deploy package.

Last week we installed the RC of Visual Studio and TFS. Instead of upgrading the Build server we installed a new one. Besides from the problem with Build Defintions that I blogged about we had one peculiar problem. We got an error when building that said:
C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v10.0\Web\Microsoft.Web.Publishing.targets (1650): The “MapUriToIisWebServer” task failed unexpectedly.
When making a search on “MapUriToIisWebServer” I found one (!) reference – how often does that happen! It referenced to the Connect site and a bug report. This told me a workaround would be to uncheck “Apply server settings to all users” on the Web tab of the Project Properties. I made this change and now it worked. Satisfied with solving that I went on with next thing without giving much thought to this…

However, things started to become strange to another user, that settings were not preserved and so on. So we started looking at this a bit more and realized what the checkbox actually did, when uncechking some settings were removed from the project file and ended up in a personal setting instead – not what we wanted.

So we started digging into this. A local build in VS worked. So to track down the error I went to the build server trying to do the same build. And this is when things started to show up. Loading the web project that contained the webdeployment did not work. An error message similar to this appeared:

The components it complained about was the IIS 6 Management Compability and some more stuff related to IIS 6. So I ended up looking at Vishal Joshis blog post about Basic Microsoft Web Deployment Tool Setup For Visual Studio 2010 and ended up installing some role services. First I tried to add the things he highlights but ended up added everything with Security and everything with IIS 6 as well as the Management Service.  

Now I was certain it would work, but I ended up with another error that is pretty new and unfamiliar to a Windows XP user:

I checked, and the account I was running under was an administrator. Then I realized I was not running the process as administrator. So right-click and say “Run as administrator” made the trick. Now it works.

A long way to a pretty simple error, but the first indication of the error was not that obvious…

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