Visual Studio 2017 can't switch between publish profiles

Question

In VS2015 community ed. I had two web deployment publish profiles set up with different server targets, like "development" and "live".

Occasionally I want to publish a single file instead of the entire web project, and I can right click on the file in solution explorer and select "publish", and it uploads it to the server.

I was able to switch between the two target servers using the configuration dropdown in the top bar:

I was able to switch freely between the two servers and upload to either one. Occasionally, if this didn't work, I could also go to the Build --> Publish menu, select the target, close without publishing, and then publish individual files by right-clicking in the Solution Explorer on the file and selecting Publish.

In VS2017 CE, this doesn't work anymore. No matter what I select from the profiles, I can only publish individual files to whatever target was selected in the previous full publish. I have to perform a full publish to the selected server, to get the target to change to that server.

Is there any way in VS2017 CE to publish individual files on the fly, to a specific target server using web deploy?

Answer 1

Look for the Web Publish Activity tab available next to Package Manager Console, Error List, Output, etc. There is a dropdown where you can select a publish profile.