Azure SDK 1.4 Refresh – Web Deploy is disabled

Hurray,

we now have web deploy integrated in the SDK, that is a major step in rapid deployments into Azure 🙂

I immediatelly installed the 1.4 Refresh and tried to deploy my application, but the web deploy checkbox was disabled…

I read the notes in the Windows Azure Team post :

• Web Deploy only works with a single role instance.
• The tool is intended only for iterative development and testing scenarios
• Web Deploy bypasses the package creation. Changes to the web pages are not durable. To preserve changes, you must package and deploy the service.

everything was ok, so looking closer to the publish window i noticed a warning: Remote Desktop must be enabled! Ok, nothing wrong there, it was already enabled.

I created a new azure application to see if the checkbox was enabled, and it was ! I suspected something was wrong with the *.csdef file. Checking it helped me solve the problem, i was still in HWC (Hostable Web Core)  mode with no “Sites” element  in the xml. After changing to Full IIS mode the checkbox was enabled 🙂

So, one requirement to use the Web Deploy is that you must be in Full IIS mode!