in Visual Studio 2013, Build succeeds but Publish fails with no details

Question

I've inherited a small webapp that was previously managed by one owner. It has been published many times before me, but I am having problems doing it myself.

on trying to publish:

1>------ Build started: Project: Foo.Logic, Configuration: Release Any CPU ------
1>      Foo.Logic -> C:\workspace\Foo\Foo.Logic\bin\Release\Foo.Logic.dll
2>------ Build started: Project: Foobar, Configuration: Release Any CPU ------
2>      Foobar -> C:\workspace\Foo\Foobar\bin\Foobar.dll
3>------ Publish started: Project: Foobar, Configuration: Release Any CPU ------
========== Build: 2 succeeded, 0 failed, 1 up-to-date, 0 skipped ==========
========== Publish: 0 succeeded, 1 failed, 0 skipped ==========

I've tried doing diagnostic for output, but that doesn't give me any details of why publish is failing. No files are written at all and I don't get a single message in Output about it trying to publish.

I've already tried quite a few links, both here and elsewhere.

Things I've done/tried so far:

• Restarted VS
• Rebooted computer
• deleted the contents of the destination directory (no change)
• published to a local directory (failed)
• published an empty/default webapp (it worked)
• Deleted source and re-cloning from git
• Precompiling (although I'm not sure if I'm doing it right)

Publish settings: Publish method: File System Configuration: Release - Any CPU

Answer 1

I talked with the previous owner of the webapp and he said it was due to a broken Visual Studio template.

The workaround solution was to build and then xcopy to the target filesystem. My previous workaround was to ask my fellow coworker (who did not have this issue with publishing F# webapps) to publish for me.

Answer 2

I resolved this issue by deleting all of the files and folders under obj\Release in Visual Studio.

I think this may have been caused by old references to some of the files which were no longer required by the project.