Whilst setting up a new agent based deployment pipeline in Release Management I decided I to reuse an existing component as it already had the correct package location set and correct transforms for the MSDeploy package. Basically this pipeline was a new copy of an existing website with different branding (css file etc.), but the same configuration options.
I had just expected this work, but I kept getting ‘file not found’ errors when MSDeploy was run. On investigation I found that the package location for the component was wrong, it was the build drop root, not the sub folder I had specified.
I have no idea why.
The fix was to copy the component, and use this copy in the pipeline. It is probably what I should have done anyway, as I expect this web site to diverge from original one, so I will need to edit the web.config transforms, but not something I thought I would have had to do now to get it working.