Whilst developing  a new Release Management pipeline I did hit a problem that a component that published MSDeploy packages to Azure started to fail.  It had been working then suddenly I started seeing ‘communication with the deployer was lost during deployment’ messages as shown below.

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No errors were shown in any logs I could find, and no files appeared on the deployment target (you would expect the files/scripts to be deployed to appear on the machine running a RM Deployment client in the C:users[account]localtempRM folder structure).

Rebooting of the Release Management server and deployment client had no effect.

The client in this case was a VM we use to do remote deployments e.g to Azure, SQL clusters etc. Place where we cannot install the RM Deployment Client. So it is used for a number of other pipelines, these were all working, so I doubted it was a communications issue.

In the end, out of frustration, I tried re-adding the component to the workflow and re-entering the parameters. Once this was done, and the old component instances delete, it all leapt into life.

I am not sure why I had the problems, I was trying to remember what I did exactly between the working and failing releases. All I can think is that I may have changed the password parameter to encrypted (I had forgotten to do this at first). Now I should have tried this sooner as I have posted on this error message before. All I can assume is that changing this parameter setting corrupted my component.

I should have read my own blog sooner