I'm looking to create a deployment artifact using TFS Build Server 2015. I have my web application building, and it looks like everything I need is in the /bin folder, but it's not applying the transforms that are normally applied if I go into Visual Studio and Publish the website.
How do I get the build to use the transforms defined?
It's hard to say without knowing more about your release process, and what output you're expecting. I'm assuming that you're not using /t:Package to build a web deploy package here.
The web.config transforms normally are only applied during the process of publishing the project. In order to force the transformation behaviour, I believe you can specify the following arguments in your call to msbuild.
/p:UseWPP_CopyWebApplication=true;PipelineDependsOnBuild=false
If you do want to publish, you'll want to run:
msbuild your.sln /p:DeployOnBuild=true;PublishProfile=yourpublishprofilename
The answer is at: Using msbuild to execute a File System Publish Profile
It's the 2nd answer, from @P. Roe. It doesn't really answer the question of that page, which is why it wasn't marked as correct, but it is the answer to your question (which was also mine).
Additionally, after doing that, I found that my connection strings were lost in the transform of the web.config. The solution to that problem is at: ReplacableToken_ when using web.config transform?
