Visual Studio 2013 supports direct WebDeploy publishing (no intermediate package files to manually move). I have this working against an Azure "Website" because the server already supports WebDeploy and Azure's Portal/Dashboard lists the WebDeploy publish settings.
But now I'm trying to set up a full Windows Server VM (on Azure, but that shouldn't matter) and though I've fully installed WebDeploy (so it seems) I cannot find where to configure the WebDeploy Service.
There are similar questions on this site, but none match perfectly (and none with applicable answers) so please check carefully before suggesting a duplicate. This one sounds similar to me but the answers don't help me.
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The option to "Configure Web Deploy Publishing" is not available in my Deploy context submenu in IIS as shown in this otherwise helpful article.
Ah, Anton from the comments section of the post says "For those who are missing the configuration option in IIS make sure you’ve installed the “Web Deploy 3.0 for Hosting Servers” – You can search for it in the Web PI tool."
And indeed there is such an option in the Web Platform Installer search, now updated for WebDeploy version 3.5
Then, you use IIS's "Management Service" panel at the server level to configure the (stopped) service to select the correct certificate for the host name you'll be accessing it by and to allow remote access.
Then, in Visual Studio 2013, use HTTP rather than the https that you might think to use. Apparently 2013 uses a different protocol. I forget where I read that.