Azure cloud service publishing wizard failing

Question

For some unknown reason, I now get this error when I try to publish my cloud service. (I'm shown as logged into visual studio, but the wizard seems to not recognise this - and step 1 of the wizard has a link to "re-enter credentials" - which gives this error too)

The service is a simple one: just a single web role.

I have tried everything I can think of, in this order:

• Restart Computer
• Restore last known working copy of the solution
• "Clean" the project
• Reset my visual studio (2013) as per this stack overflow answer

Any help / pointers would be very very welcome, I'm stumped - and I'm stuck with a cloud service that I can't publish to!!!

Here is my visual studio info:

Microsoft Visual Studio Professional 2013
Version 12.0.31101.00 Update 4
Microsoft .NET Framework
Version 4.5.50938

Installed Version: Professional

LightSwitch for Visual Studio 2013   06177-004-0447006-02367
Microsoft LightSwitch for Visual Studio 2013

Team Explorer for Visual Studio 2013   06177-004-0447006-02367
Microsoft Team Explorer for Visual Studio 2013

Visual Basic 2013   06177-004-0447006-02367
Microsoft Visual Basic 2013

Visual C# 2013   06177-004-0447006-02367
Microsoft Visual C# 2013

Visual C++ 2013   06177-004-0447006-02367
Microsoft Visual C++ 2013

Visual F# 2013   06177-004-0447006-02367
Microsoft Visual F# 2013

Visual Studio 2013 Code Analysis Spell Checker   06177-004-0447006-02367
Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2013 Code Analysis Spell Checker

Portions of International CorrectSpell™ spelling correction system © 1993 by Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V. All rights reserved.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition Copyright © 1992 Houghton Mifflin Company. Electronic version licensed from Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V. All rights reserved.

Application Insights Tools for Visual Studio Package   1.0
Application Insights Tools for Visual Studio

ASP.NET and Web Tools   12.4.60425.0
Microsoft Web Developer Tools contains the following components:
Support for creating and opening ASP.NET web projects
Browser Link: A communication channel between Visual Studio and browsers
Editor extensions for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
Page Inspector: Inspection tool for ASP.NET web projects
Scaffolding: A framework for building and running code generators
Server Explorer extensions for Microsoft Azure Web Apps
Web publishing: Extensions for publishing ASP.NET web projects to hosting providers, on-premises servers, or Microsoft Azure

ASP.NET Web Frameworks and Tools 2012.2   4.1.21001.0
For additional information, visit http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=309563

ASP.NET Web Frameworks and Tools 2013   5.2.21010.0
For additional information, visit http://www.asp.net/

Common Azure Tools   1.4
Provides common services for use by Azure Mobile Services and Microsoft Azure Tools.

Microsoft Azure HDInsight HQL Service   2.0.1000.0
Language service for Hive query

Microsoft Azure HDInsight Tools for Visual Studio   2.0.1000.0
An integrated development environment for HDInsight application development.

Microsoft Azure Mobile Services Tools   1.3
Microsoft Azure Mobile Services Tools

Microsoft Azure Tools   2.6
Microsoft Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 - v2.6.30423.1601

NuGet Package Manager   2.8.50926.663
NuGet Package Manager in Visual Studio. For more information about NuGet, visit http://docs.nuget.org/.

Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2013 ENU   12.0.30626
Microsoft Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2013 ENU

PreEmptive Analytics Visualizer   1.2
Microsoft Visual Studio extension to visualize aggregated summaries from the PreEmptive Analytics product.

SQL Server Data Tools   12.0.41012.0
Microsoft SQL Server Data Tools

Windows Phone 8.1 SDK Integration   1.0
This package integrates the tools for the Windows Phone 8.1 SDK into the menus and controls of Visual Studio.

Workflow Manager Tools 1.0   1.0
This package contains the necessary Visual Studio integration components for Workflow Manager.

Answer 1

Ok, so by sheer chance (and after much frustration - most of a day wasted), I clicked into the "Manage" dialog for the subscription (the blue item here:)

This had a link for me to sign out, then when I signed back in again all was ok... strange, because the "re-enter your credentials" link on the main dialog didn't resolve thing... oh well - posted here in case some other poor sod has the same problem: hope it saves you some time!

Answer 2

I had faced the same issue in the past. VS 2015 throws this error but VS 2017 doesn't. With the help of fiddler I was able to find out the root cause of it. VS 2015 was trying to authenticate my account against the tenant on which I do not have access any more. Now when I say access, there could be many reasons for it. Like, when I was trying to authenticate with my org account, I saw "User is disabled" error in fiddler logs. So I asked my administrator to enable my account, and since then it is working fine for me.

Similarly, I faced the same issue with my personal account as well. But this time, I could not see any error in fiddler logs. However, through fiddler I got to know which tenant is being used by VS 2015 to authenticate my account. Then I logged into Azure portal and found that i do not have any subsricption assigned to me on that tenant. So i asked the administrator of that tenant to completely remove me from this tenant. Once that happened everything worked fine.

So I believe, the issue is, VS 2015 always try to authenticate your account on which you do not have access anymore and thats why we recieve that error.

Fiddler traces

1) The first http call returns the list of all the tenants associated with your account. 2) Subsequent calls clearly tells you which tenantId is being used to authenticate. 3) And, one of the call will also tell you about actual AD error (if any)

Thats how it helped to fix this issue.