Visual Studio uses Publishing Profile to package up all the information related to your web projects deployment. When you deploy your services or apps in Azure App Services, all the settings related to your deployment saved into the publishing profile, which you can leverage for speedup any further deployment for the same services. If you create the App Services directly in Azure Portal, you need the publish profile settings to deploy the services.
Either of these cases most of the time we follow the approach of navigating through Azure Portal and download the publishing profile from there. This will download the PublishSettings File (.PublishSettings) from the portal, which you can use it further for faster deployments.
Further you can use the downloaded Publish profile setting and import it for your deployments.
Now, here is the interesting part, you can download this .PublishSettings file directly from the Visual Studio by using the Cloud Explorer Extension. If you are working with Azure, this tool must be very much familiar to you. You can launch it from View –> Cloud Explorer.
Visual Studio Cloud Explorer enables us to connect with Azure Subscription and view corresponding Azure resources, explore their properties, and perform several actions directly from Visual Studio.
Related Tip : Getting an Application Insights Instrumentation Key inside Visual Studio itself
Connect with the specific Azure subscription and drill down to the respective app services. Once you select the specific app service – you can download the publish settings from the Action Tab -> Download Publish Profile, or by just right clicking – Download Publish Profile
This will definitely speedup your overall process of deployment.
Hope this helps.
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