Publish to a New Azure Website from behind a Proxy

One of the great things about Azure is the ease of which you can spin up a new cloud based website using Powershell. From there you can quickly publish any web-based solution from Visual Studio to the Azure hosted site.

To show how simple this is; After configuring PowerShell to use an Azure Subscription, I’ve created a new Azure hosted website in the new Melbourne (Australia Southeast) region:

Creating a new website in PowerShell

That was extremely easy. What next? Publish your existing ASP.NET MVC application from Visual Studio to the web site. For this test, I’ve used Microsoft Visual Studio Ultimate 2013 Update 3 (VS2013). VS2013 offers a simple way from the built-in Publish Web dialogue to select your newly created (or existing) websites.

Web Publish to Azure Websites

This will require that you have already signed in with your Microsoft account linked with a subscription, or you have already imported your subscription certificate to Visual Studio (you can use the same certificate generated for PowerShell). Once your subscription is configured you can select the previously created WebSite:

Select Existing Azure Website

The Publish Web dialogue appears, but at this point you may experience failure when you attempt to validate the connection or publish the WebSite. If you are behind a proxy; then the error will show as destination not reachable.

Unable to publish to an Azure Website from behind a proxy

[code gutter=”false”]
Could not connect to the remote computer ("mykloudtestapp.scm.azurewebsites.net"). On the remote computer, make sure that Web Deploy is installed and that the required process ("Web Management Service") is started. Learn more at: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=221672#ERROR_DESTINATION_NOT_REACHABLE. Unable to connect to the remote server
[/code]

The version of Web Deploy included with VS2013 is not able to publish via a Proxy. Even if you configure the msbuild.exe.config to have the correct proxy settings as documented by Microsoft, it will still fail.

Luckily in August 2014 Web Deploy v3.6 BETA3 was released that fixes this issue. To resolve this error, you can download the Web Deploy beta and patch your VS2013 installation. After patching Visual Studio; you can modify the proxy settings used by msbuild.exe (msbuild.exe.config) to use the system proxy:

[code language=”xml”]
<system.net>
<defaultProxy useDefaultCredentials="true" />
</system.net>
[/code]

You should now be able to publish to your Azure WebSite from behind a proxy with VS2013 Web Deploy.