Within the web publishing tools in Visual Studio there are a few places where we point to more resources. For example if you open a VS publish profile (.pubxml) file you will see a link in the comments pointing to http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=208121.

Note: you can find the VS publish profiles in your web project under Properties\PublishProfiles or My Project\PublishProfiles

This is an “FWLink” and we can set the destination URL to whatever value we want. In this case the FWLink points to How to: Edit Deployment Settings in Publish Profile (.pubxml) Files and the .wpp.targets File in Visual Studio Web Projects. In some cases the FWLink ends up pointing to a blog post instead of a formal doc page.

I will point a few FWLinks to the blog post for more info on the specific topics. See below for each item.

 Publish message indicating 4.5 is not supported by hosting provider

If you publish an ASP.NET 4.5 web project to a Windows Azure Web Site (WAWS) before ASP.NET 4.5 is supported by WAWS you will receive the following error.

Error : Your hosting provider does not yet support ASP.NET 4.5, which your application is configured to use. To learn more about this please visit: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=247936

Since we know that the end point will not be able to run an ASP.NET 4.5 we let you know about it before your site is published. If you switch to ASP.NET 4.0 you will be able to publish your project. If you want to bypass the 4.5 check you can do that too. Just edit the VS publish profile (.pubxml file) and add the following immediately above the closing tag.

  false

Database publishing in Visual Studio 2010 when running on Windows XP

One of the features that we added is the ability to incrementally publish database schema along with your web project. We rely on technology created by the SQL group which are a part of SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT). Unfortunately these tools do not support Windows XP. Because of that you will see the following message.

When we shipped Visual Studio 2010 we added support for non-incremental database publishing. You can use those features when running on Windows XP. You can read more at Deploying a SQL Server Database. Note: for users not running on XP its recommended to configure database publishing on the publish dialog. You can find more info on that at How to: Deploy a Web Application Project Using One-Click Publish in Visual Studio.

Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi | @SayedIHashimi