How to Package an Application Using MSBUILD

To deploy an application as a hosted service in Windows Azure, you must first package the application in the appropriate format. You can use the MSBuild command from a Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 command prompt to create an application package. The following scenarios might require you to prepare the package by using MSBuild:

• You change the service configuration file and you want to repackage the application quickly.
  
  
• You are integrating a Windows Azure project into a larger automated build process.
  
  

The following procedure assumes that you have a Visual Studio project created using the Windows Azure SDK and the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio. For more information about installing the tools, see Download Windows Azure SDK.

To package the application

---

1. Click Start, click All Programs, click Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, click Visual Studio Tools, and then click Visual Studio 2010 Command Prompt.

2. Navigate to the location of the .ccproj file for the project.

3. On the Visual Studio command line, type the following command to create an application package:

   Copy

   msbuild [projectname].ccproj /target:publish
   

   For projects created with Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio version 1.3 and earlier, the package is created in the bin\Debug\app.publish folder. For projects created with Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio version 1.4 and later, the package is created in the folder specified by $(PublishDir), which defaults to bin\Debug\app.publish.

See Also