I’ve been using MS Web Deploy for several months to publish changes to the ASP.Net Core Razor Pages application that I am developing. The other day Web Deploy quit working, and I’ve spent more hours than I could count trying to find out why. This blog post explains it and provides a fix. (Removing and re-installing Web Deploy on the server might also work.)

Web Deploy creates an internal account, WDeployConfigWriter, giving it a password that expires. After the password expires, Web Deploy no longer works. It offers an unhelpful messages that basically says something went wrong on the server (and good luck figuring out what). When this first happened, I didn’t see the audit failure in the server security log. Once I did, I searched and found a StackOverflow post pointing to the blog post, which dates to 2011. I guess there are no plans to fix the problem.

If you use Web Deploy and it is still working, you might want to mark the account non-expiring before this happens.