Have you ever had Visual Studio tell you your web application publish failed, but never gives you a reason why?  You’re not alone.  I’ve been putting off looking into this issue on a project and just found a way to get my answer right away.

Visual Studio 2008's Publish Failed message

Here’s what you should do inside of Visual Studio to find out why your publish failed.

1. Click the Tools menu > then Options to bring up the Options dialog.
2. Expand ‘Projects and Solutions’ on the left and click General
3. On General, click ‘Show Output window when build starts’
4. Now click on ‘Build and Run’ in the left tree
5. Next select a value from the ‘MSBuild project build output verbosity’ drop down menu
6. OK your way back to the main Visual Studio window
7. The next time you Build or Publish your project, you should see the Output panel pop up.  If your publish is still failing, the answer will live inside the Output panel

Here’s a visual walkthrough of these instructions.

Tools > Options > Projects and Solutions > General

Tools > Options > Projects and Solutions > Build and Run

Visual Studio's Output Panel