Visual Studio - The components for communicating with FTP servers are not installed Error - How to fix

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Here's a common issue that a Visual Studio developer might hit when trying to publish a project created in Visual Studio 2015, 2017 and so on using ClickOnce, FTP or other publishing options:

The components for communicating with FTP servers are not installed.

This is a known bug that originates from VS2010 and is still affecting all VS instance, from VS2010 to VS2017 throughout the years.

To get rid of it, you can try one of the following workarounds:

  • Close and restart Visual Studio.
  • Close Visual Studio, open a different project, publish it, then reload your original project.
  • Reinstall the VC12 redistributable (32-bit version), as suggested here.
  • Navigate to the Visual Studio installation folder, such as C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\IDE  (for VS2015), and run the following command: devenv /resetuserdata

That's about it: I hope that this post will help anyone who's stuck with this nasty issue.

 

About Ryan

IT Project Manager, Web Interface Architect and Lead Developer for many high-traffic web sites & services hosted in Italy and Europe. Since 2010 it's also a lead designer for many App and games for Android, iOS and Windows Phone mobile devices for a number of italian companies. Microsoft MVP for Development Technologies since 2018.

View all posts by Ryan

One Comment on “Visual Studio - The components for communicating with FTP servers are not installed Error - How to fix”

  1. Thanks this worked for me
    – Reinstall the VC12 redistributable (32-bit version), as suggested here.

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