Because Web Deploy is a client-server product, unless it is set up correctly, chances are you will hit a wall pretty quickly at the point where a connection is made. In this blog post, I will show you common solutions for common errors.

Read on for general tips and recipes for fixing common connectivity errors.

General Tips

- Web Deploy sometimes returns different information in errors messages if you provide administrator credentials vs. non-administrator credentials. If you hit an error, try to run the command as administrator.
-  Web Deploy sometimes returns different information if source and destination machine are the same vs. destination machine is remote. If you hit an error, try to run it on the remote machine.
- Run the command with –verbose and –debug switches. These will make Web Deploy spit out more information which can be useful in debugging.

Error: 503 Server Unavailable

Error Trace:

msdeploy.exe -verb:dump -source:apphostconfig,computerName=demo-host

Error: Object of type ‘appHostConfig’ and path ” cannot be created.
Error: Remote agent (URL http://demo-host/MSDEPLOYAGENTSERVICE) could not be contacted. Make sure the remote agent service is installed and started on the target computer.
Error: An unsupported response was received. The response header ‘MSDeploy.Response’ was ” but ‘v1′ was expected.
Error: The remote server returned an error: (503) Server Unavailable.
Error count: 1.

Why it happens:

- Incorrect destination name or host unreachable.
- Remote Agent Service not installed on destination.

How to fix it:

- Make sure you can ping the remote computer.
- Run this command on the destination in an elevated command prompt: “net start msdepsvc”. This will start the Remote Agent Service on the destination, which allows administrator deployments.

Error: Default credentials cannot be supplied for the basic authentication scheme

Error Trace:

msdeploy.exe -verb:dump -source:apphostconfig,wmsvc=demo-host
Error: Object of type ‘appHostConfig’ and path ” cannot be created.
Error: The specified credentials cannot be used with the authentication scheme ‘basic’.
Error: Default credentials cannot be supplied for the basic authentication scheme.
Parameter name: authType
Error count: 1.

Why it happens:

- You are telling Web Deploy to connect to the Web Management Service on the destination. By default, Web Deploy will connect using HTTP Basic Authentication.
- When using HTTP Basic Authentication, specific credentials must be supplied, which is not true in the command shown above.

How to fix it:

Change the command to:

msdeploy.exe -verb:dump -source:apphostconfig,wmsvc=demo-host,authType:basic,username=someuser,password=somepassword

Error: The remote certificate is invalid according to the validation procedure.

Error Trace:

msdeploy.exe -verb:dump -source:apphostconfig,wmsvc=demo-host,authType=basic,username=someuser,password=somepassword
Error: Object of type ‘appHostConfig’ and path ” cannot be created.
Error: Could not complete the request to remote agent URL ‘https://demo-host:8172/msdeploy.axd?Site=’.
Error: The underlying connection was closed: Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel.
Error: The remote certificate is invalid according to the validation procedure.
Error count: 1.

Why it happens:

- You are connecting to the destination using the Web Management Service (wmsvc), which creates an HTTPS connection.
- The certificate on the destination is invalid, so you see this error.

How to fix it:

- Install a valid wmsvc certificate on the destination
- OR add the –allowUntrusted flag on the command

msdeploy.exe -verb:dump -source:apphostconfig,wmsvc=demo-host,authType=basic,username=someuser,password=somepassword –allowUntrusted

Reasons why you must trust ASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to what ASPHostPortal does. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL Hardware
Dell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.
- Recovery Systems
Recovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.
- Control Panel
We provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.
- Excellent Expertise in Technology
The reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.
- Data Center
ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security
- Monitoring Services
From the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.
- Network
ASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.
- Security
Network security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.
- Support Services
Engineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services.

Following will be the example if you would like to use Request QueryString to pass value between 2 CSHTML page.

We have have 2 web pages, Page.cshtml and Page2.cshtml. Under Page.cshtm, there will be a textbox and a button, whatever user enter in the textbox, it will be pass over to Page2.cshtml.

Here the code on Page.cshtml. We use the Request.Form to capture the input by the user from the textbox. The value then store in the variable "formValue" which will be pass over to Name under Response.Redirect.

@{ 
    var formValue = Request.Form["myTextBox"];  
    if (IsPost) 
     { 
         
        Response.Redirect("Page2.cshtml?name=" + formValue); 
         
     } 
} 
<!DOCTYPE html> 
 
<html lang="en"> 
    <head> 
        <meta charset="utf-8" /> 
        <title>Page 1</title> 
    </head> 
    <body> 
 <form action="" method="post"> 
        <input type="text" id="myTextBox" name="myTextBox"/> 
                    <input type="submit" value="submit"/> 
</form>          
    </body> 
</html>

Here's the code on Page2.cshtml, please take note on the previous code Response.Redirect("Page2.cshtml?name=" + formValue); we actually pass the value to the variable named "NAME". so in Page2.cshtml, we will capture the value NAME. We used Request.QueryString to capture the value from the URL which will be http://localhost/page2.cshtml?name=WHATEVERUSERINPUT.

@{ 
    var queryValue = Request.QueryString["name"];   

} 
<!DOCTYPE html>  

<html lang="en"> 
    <head> 
        <meta charset="utf-8" /> 
        <title>Page 2</title> 
    </head> 
    <body> 
        @queryValue 
    </body> 
</html>

For this example, queryValue will return the value of "WHATEVERUSERINPUT".

Happy coding.

Reasons why you must trust ASPHostPortal.com

Every provider will tell you how they treat their support, uptime, expertise, guarantees, etc., are. Take a close look. What they’re really offering you is nothing close to what ASPHostPortal does. You will be treated with respect and provided the courtesy and service you would expect from a world-class web hosting business.

You’ll have highly trained, skilled professional technical support people ready, willing, and wanting to help you 24 hours a day. Your web hosting account servers are monitored from three monitoring points, with two alert points, every minute, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The followings are the list of other added- benefits you can find when hosting with us:

- DELL Hardware
Dell hardware is engineered to keep critical enterprise applications running around the clock with clustered solutions fully tested and certified by Dell and other leading operating system and application providers.
- Recovery Systems
Recovery becomes easy and seamless with our fully managed backup services. We monitor your server to ensure your data is properly backed up and recoverable so when the time comes, you can easily repair or recover your data.
- Control Panel
We provide one of the most comprehensive customer control panels available. Providing maximum control and ease of use, our Control Panel serves as the central management point for your ASPHostPortal account. You’ll use a flexible, powerful hosting control panel that will give you direct control over your web hosting account. Our control panel and systems configuration is fully automated and this means your settings are configured automatically and instantly.
- Excellent Expertise in Technology
The reason we can provide you with a great amount of power, flexibility, and simplicity at such a discounted price is due to incredible efficiencies within our business. We have not just been providing hosting for many clients for years, we have also been researching, developing, and innovating every aspect of our operations, systems, procedures, strategy, management, and teams. Our operations are based on a continual improvement program where we review thousands of systems, operational and management metrics in real-time, to fine-tune every aspect of our operation and activities. We continually train and retrain all people in our teams. We provide all people in our teams with the time, space, and inspiration to research, understand, and explore the Internet in search of greater knowledge. We do this while providing you with the best hosting services for the lowest possible price.
- Data Center
ASPHostPortal modular Tier-3 data center was specifically designed to be a world-class web hosting facility totally dedicated to uncompromised performance and security
- Monitoring Services
From the moment your server is connected to our network it is monitored for connectivity, disk, memory and CPU utilization – as well as hardware failures. Our engineers are alerted to potential issues before they become critical.
- Network
ASPHostPortal has architected its network like no other hosting company. Every facet of our network infrastructure scales to gigabit speeds with no single point of failure.
- Security
Network security and the security of your server are ASPHostPortal’s top priorities. Our security team is constantly monitoring the entire network for unusual or suspicious behavior so that when it is detected we can address the issue before our network or your server is affected.
- Support Services
Engineers staff our data center 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to manage the network infrastructure and oversee top-of-the-line servers that host our clients’ critical sites and services

When developing ASP.NET MVC3 application one often needs to add similar actions to different controllers; for example controllers that enable the user to perform the basic CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operations typically contain action methods like Create(), Update() or Delete(). To avoid duplicate code a simple solution could be a common base controller. In complex applications this approach could have some limitations, since .NET does not support multi inheritance, e.g. each controller could have only one base controller.

This blog post shows a prototypically approach how to implement action methods that can be used in more than one controller with the help of the re-mix library which adds mixins support to .NET. Since the approach shown below is only a proof of concept, it has some limitations that are listed at the end of the post.

After downloading re-mix and adding references to the dll files contained in the folder net-3.5\bin\release one need a custom controller factory that uses remix’s ObjectFactory to create the controller objects:

public class RemixControllerFactory : IControllerFactory
{
  private IControllerFactory _defaultControllerFactory; 

  public RemixControllerFactory()
  {
    _defaultControllerFactory = new DefaultControllerFactory();
  } 

  public IController CreateController(RequestContext requestContext, string controllerName)
  {
    // Use the default ControllerFactory to get the type of the controller
    var controllerType = _defaultControllerFactory.CreateController(requestContext, controllerName).GetType(); 

    // Use remix's ObjectFactory to instantiate the (mixed) controller
    return (IController)ObjectFactory.Create(controllerType);
  } 

  public SessionStateBehavior GetControllerSessionBehavior(RequestContext requestContext, string controllerName)
  {
    return SessionStateBehavior.Default;
  } 

  public void ReleaseController(IController controller)
  {
  }
}

The custom RemixControllerFactory is set as the default controller factory in the Global.asax.as file:

protected void Application_Start()
{
  [...]
  ControllerBuilder.Current.SetControllerFactory(new RemixControllerFactory());
  [...]
}

In a next step we implement the interface that defines the action methods (Echo in this example) that will be used to extend the controllers:

public class IEchoControllerMixin
{
  ActionResult Echo(string id);
}

In a last step we implement the IEchoControllerMixin:

public class EchoControllerMixin : Mixin<ControllerBase>, IEchoControllerMixin
{
  public ActionResult Echo(string id)
  {
    var result = new ContentResult();
    var controllerName = Target.ControllerContext.RouteData.Values["controller"].ToString();
    result.Content = string.Format("re-mix added Echo action to controller '{0}'<hr/>You said: {1}", controllerName, !string.IsNullOrEmpty(id) ? id : "<i>nothing</i>");
    return result;
  } 

  [OverrideTarget]
  protected IActionInvoker CreateActionInvoker()
  {
    return new RemixControllerActionInvoker(typeof(IEchoControllerMixin));
  }
}

Due to security reasons ASP.NET MVC only allows to call action methods that are defined in a class that inherits System.Web.Mvc.ControllerBase. Since re-mix creates (automatically generated) proxy objects with their own inheritance structures, ASP.NET MVC does not find the Echo action by default. To bypass this limitation we implement a custom RemixControllerActionInvoker that allows calling actions that are defined in implementations of the IEchoControllerMixin interface. To do this we use reflection to call a non-public ASP.NET MVC functionality that creates an ActionDescriptor that skip the security check:

public class RemixControllerActionInvoker : ControllerActionInvoker
{
  private Type _remixType; 

  public RemixControllerActionInvoker(Type remixType)
  {
    _remixType = remixType;
  } 

  protected override ActionDescriptor FindAction(ControllerContext controllerContext, ControllerDescriptor controllerDescriptor, string actionName)
  {
    // Use default action descriptor
    ActionDescriptor actionDescriptor = controllerDescriptor.FindAction(controllerContext, actionName);
    if (actionDescriptor != null) return actionDescriptor; 

    // Create action descriptor that accepts actions that are defined in the remix type
    var internalConstructor = typeof(ReflectedActionDescriptor).GetConstructor(
      BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance, null, new [] { typeof(MethodInfo), typeof(string), typeof(ControllerDescriptor), typeof(bool) }, null
    );
    return (ActionDescriptor)internalConstructor.Invoke(new object[] { _remixType.GetMethod(actionName), actionName, controllerDescriptor, false });
  }
}

After all the preparations we are finally able to “intermix” the Echo action to any controller:

[Uses(typeof(EchoControllerMixin))]
public class Controller1Controller : Controller
{
}
[Uses(typeof(EchoControllerMixin))]
public class Controller2Controller : Controller
{
}

To test the Echo action in both controllers, just open http://localhost:[...]/Controller1/Echo/Hello or http://localhost:[...]/Controller2/Echo/Hello.

Summarized mixins enable adding actions to controllers without the need of a common base controller; actions defined in mixins are completely decoupled from any inheritance structure and can be added to any controller.

As written in introduction, the approach shown above is only prototypical and has some limitations (which should be resolvable with some additional logic/code):

1. Since the mixin overrides the CreateActionInvoker() of the controller that is “intermixed”, one could neither use more than one mixin in one controller nor use a custom CreateActionInvoker() method.

2. In actions defined in mixins one does not have access to the protected ASP.NET MVC controller methods that create ActionResult objects like View(), PartialView(), Json(), Content(), …

3. One needs to use reflection to call a protected ReflectedActionDescriptor constructor.

4. The RemixControllerActionInvoker implementation does not consider the action parameter when creating the action descriptor. In result the action names defined in the mixins needs to be unique.