I’m currently evaluating Release Manager in Visual Studio Team Services and I am using it to deploy website to Azure Web Apps. I recently tried to deploy an Asp.Net MVC 4 application and ran into some issues.
I’ve created a build that packages and zips up my web application which runs successfully.I’ve linked a Release pipeline to this build and I can deploy to my test Azure site without any errors, but when I try and run the web application I get the following error:
Could not load file or assembly 'System.Web.Mvc, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.
I’m using Visual Studio 2013 with MVC as a nuget package.Looking at the properties of System.Web.Mvc I can see that it is set to Copy Local = True
I tried a few different things to try to get the assembly to be copied like redoing the nuget install and eventually I toggled the Copy Local to False, saved the project file and then set it back to true. When I looked at the diff of the project file I found an additional property
This seems to fix the build. When I checked this in and rebuild, System.Web.Mvc now appears in the zip file. The build was then release to Azure and the web app worked correctly.