"IIS Web Application Name' has already been defined" when using msdeploy from TFS Build - msbuild

Question

So here's the deal: I have a Visual Studio solution that is made up of numerous projects. Two of these projects are web application projects. Of these two, I want to have TFS build deploy one of them to our dev server after a successful build/test run.
To get the web app to deploy, I updated the deploy target of my .csproj so it looks like the following:
<PropertyGroup Condition=" '$(Configuration)|$(Platform)' == 'Debug|AnyCPU' ">
<DebugSymbols>true</DebugSymbols>
<DebugType>full</DebugType>
<Optimize>false</Optimize>
<OutputPath>bin\</OutputPath>
<DefineConstants>DEBUG;TRACE</DefineConstants>
<ErrorReport>prompt</ErrorReport>
<WarningLevel>4</WarningLevel>
<DeployOnBuild>true</DeployOnBuild>
<DeployTarget>MsDeployPublish</DeployTarget>
<CreatePackageOnPublish>true</CreatePackageOnPublish>
<MSDeployPublishMethod>WMSVC</MSDeployPublishMethod>
<MSDeployServiceUrl>https://192.168.21.79</MSDeployServiceUrl>
<DeployIisAppPath>DeploymentTest</DeployIisAppPath>
<UserName>deploy</UserName>
<Password>sosecure</Password>
<AllowUntrustedCertificate>true</AllowUntrustedCertificate>
<SkipExtraFilesOnServer>true</SkipExtraFilesOnServer>
</PropertyGroup>
With this configuration, my web app was getting deployed to the server successfully. Unfortunately there was one minor problem. For reasons that are too frustrating to go into here (and at the end of the day, can't likely be changed), when the deploy runs and pushes the app to our server, there's one CSS file in the project that I need skipped. That is to say, I want the server copy of the file to be left alone, even if it's different from what's in the project.
To support this requirement, I added the following to my .csproj:
<PropertyGroup>
<OnBeforePackageUsingManifest>AddSkipRules</OnBeforePackageUsingManifest>
</PropertyGroup>
<Target Name="AddSkipRules">
<ItemGroup>
<MsDeploySkipRules Include="SkipCss">
<SkipAction>Delete</SkipAction>
<ObjectName>filePath</ObjectName>
<AbsolutePath>site\.css$</AbsolutePath>
<XPath>
</XPath>
</MsDeploySkipRules>
<MsDeploySkipRules Include="SkipCss2">
<SkipAction>Update</SkipAction>
<ObjectName>filePath</ObjectName>
<AbsolutePath>site\.css$</AbsolutePath>
<XPath>
</XPath>
</MsDeploySkipRules>
</ItemGroup>
</Target>
With this added, my expectation was that the build would skip processing of my site.css file. Alas, after trying a number of different things, the file always got updated on the server. After a bit more digging, I found something (here on SO or on a blog, don't recall at this point) that mentioned the .csproj needs a directive to ensure msdeploy.exe is used to handle the deployment. With that in mind, I added the following:
<PropertyGroup>
<UseMsDeployExe>true</UseMsDeployExe>
</PropertyGroup>
Now when I run the build, it fails with the following error:
MSDEPLOY: The parameter 'IIS Web Application Name' has already been defined.
So, I tried removing the <DeployIssAppPath> element from the .csproj but that just led to the following error:
C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v11.0\Web\Microsoft.Web.Publishing.targets (4220): The "ConcatFullServiceUrlWithSiteName" task was not given a value for the required parameter "SiteAppName".
At this point I'm pretty much out of ideas and really need to get this thing working. Any suggestions or insight as to what I'm missing to get around the error about 'IIS Web Application Name' already being defined or the last error about 'SiteAppName' not having a value would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Have you tried stopping the app pool for the target before deploying? I use something like this in PowerShell, which is called from MSBuild in my deployment processes:
echo ""
echo "Stopping $($args[0]) App Pool..."
echo ""
#Stop App Pool
MsDeployAppPoolSwitch $args[0] $args[1] $args[2] $args[3] "StopAppPool"
echo ""
echo "Deploying to $($args[0])..."
echo ""
#Deploy Site
WebsiteDeploy $args[0] $args[1] $args[2] $args[3] $DropFolder
echo ""
echo "Starting $($args[0]) App Pool..."
echo ""
#Start App Pool
MsDeployAppPoolSwitch $args[0] $args[1] $args[2] $args[3] "StartAppPool"