MSDeploy is really good for deploying websites and syncing up websites but it can be a real pain to configure and get going intially. The MSDeploy documentation is a bit poor as well and quite often you’ll get a very strange error which can be quite cryptic.

Error Code: ERROR_DESTINATION_NOT_REACHABLE 

The error message isn’t actually too bad in this case, it’s saying either the Web Management Service isn’t running OR it can’t find MSDeploy. Ok so checklist for this problem:

• Web Management Service (WMSVC) is running on the target server
• Port 8172 is open (checked with Telnet for good measure)
• Can you connect to https://servername:8172/msdeploy.axd
• Is MSDeploy installed

If you are like me and you don’t like people shouting, you’ll be quite releaved that you can stop the Menus from Visual Studio 2012 from shouting at you by changing the Menus from Uppercase to Lowercase is as simple as adding the following key in the registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\General\SuppressUppercaseConversion
REG_DWORD value: 1