Unable to observe “Publish” menu item in VS2017 for .Net Core app

Question

I'm unable to observe the "Publish" feature in VS2017 for my .Net Core web app.

My goal is to publish my web services to a remote host that runs IIS.

How do I get the Publish menu item to show up on the context menu?

Answer 1

Latest version of Visual Studio 2017 - 15.4.5 only supports publishing F# on Azure . You can try Visual Studio 2017 15.5 Preview 4 that should support what you are asking or wait for full release. You can read more about it here

Answer 2

To deploy ASP.NET Core Applications to an IIS instance,

you first need to download and install ASPNETCoreModule IIS Handler on the Server https://github.com/dotnet/core/blob/master/release-notes/download-archives/2.0.0-download.md#windows-server-hosting

This is what allows your IIS launch and manage your .NET Core App

When that is done, you need to "publish" your application. So from the Web Application directory, you run

dotnet publish -o "C:\\Temp"

you can also enter any other Directory. Just copy the contents to the server and it should work

NOTE:

For older versions of .NET Core (1.x) with F#, you need to verify that you have the IISHandler middleware configured you'd do something like app.UseIISIntegration()

In some few cases, It also did not generate web.config files in those cases, you need to manually add them. Below is a sample of the web.config file

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration>
  <system.webServer>
    <handlers>
      <add name="aspNetCore" path="*" verb="*" modules="AspNetCoreModule" resourceType="Unspecified"/>
    </handlers>
    <aspNetCore processPath="%LAUNCHER_PATH%" arguments="%LAUNCHER_ARGS%" stdoutLogEnabled="false" stdoutLogFile=".\logs\stdout" forwardWindowsAuthToken="false"/>
  </system.webServer>
</configuration>