“Where has the _PublishedWebsite folder gone in 2015?” This is a common question I have been seeing from people that have started using Visual Studio 2015 and the new Team Build 2015.

If you’ve been building web applications using Team Foundation Server 2013 or earlier, you’ll know that a folder named _PublishedWebsite is automatically created and copied to the Drop folder specified in your build definition. This has allowed us to easily write scripts to simply copy the content to a folder on our IIS server.

If you create a new Build Definition using Visual Studio 2015 and Team Build 2015, you will notice that not only is this folder no longer created by default but when you look in the drop folder you may only see the BIN directory and none of the website content at all.

If you’re keen to have the well-loved _PublishedWebsites folder created in 2015, it is a very simple thing to fix. All you need to do is add the following text into the MSBuild arguments field in the General tab of your Build definition.

/p:OutDir=$(build.stagingDirectory)

This is what it looks like in added to the MSBuild Arguments field in the General tab of the build definition.

Now when you trigger your build, the folder and all of its content is there, just like it has been in the past. If you want to copy the contents of the _PublishedWebsites folder, you can specify the copy source as $(Agent.BuildDirectory)\Staging\_PublishedWebsites