We have been using Web Deployment Projects on a build server for several months now and everything has been running smoothly. Unfortunately, after including resource files for other languages we are getting weird errors after installing the application on a web server: sometimes certain pages give a http 403, sometimes certain pages are not found, sometimes the whole application just gives a "Server unavailable"; this varies from build to build but stays the same for one build on several web servers and over several iisresets. I guess that there is a problem with the satellite assemblies that are being created when resource files for multiple languages exist but I can not get any helpful information on either the build or the web server. Originally I had "Move all outputs to a single assembly" and "Treat as library component" selected and I thought the problem might have something to do with the merge process but changing this to "Create a separate assembly..." did not change the behaviour. How can find out where the problem could be? And how can I make this work?

I'm using WDP 2008 (9.0.21022) with VS2008 SP1 and I'm deploying a "Web Site" project.

Any chance you could provide specific steps that another person could follow independently to reproduce the issue?

For example, the basic steps for a simple web site might be the following:

1. Create a new web site.

2. Add a new resource file App_GlobalResources\Resource.resx with a string "String1" with value "Value1".

3. Add App_GlobalResources\Resource.fr-fr.resx with a string "String1" with value "Value1-fr"

4. Right click on the web site project, choose add Web Deployment Project.

5. Right click on the WDP, choose "Property Pages".

6. Select "Merge All Outputs to a Single Assembly".

7. Deploy output to server under IIS.

8. Request page default.aspx.

Another thing you could do is to try your web site deploying WITHOUT Web Deployment Project to see if it works.

 Actually it was that simple, just as you described it - and deploying without WDP did work.

The thing is that after a couple of days the error was gone and the builds worked fine. I have not changed anything; there has not been a relevant code change and the build server has not been touched at all, but including the languages some days later produced a valid output assembly - and has since then. I have no explanation for that whatsoever; just as the problems where inconsistent, now the solution is. Anyway, with the problem gone I can not investigate any further so let's consider (hope) this solved.

Glad to know that the problem is gone (for now).

You could also try taking a look at event viewer to see if they have been any errors logged from ASP.NET.