Today, while sitting through the MVP 2013 sessions and watching Scott Gu's Azure demos I decided to finally try quickly setting up a free Azure Web site and publish it. The process is super easy. Create the site online using the Azure portal and then use the management portal to download the publish settings. Then on the local machine create a new site, set up a simple sample page, and then use Web Publish to push it up to Azure.

Or so it should be. But I ran into an ugly snag: When I click "Publish" on my Web project - unceremoniously nothing happens. I see the publish window flash, but after that Visual Studio is locked up solid. Not the experience I hoped for.

Turns out the the problem is that while I've been travelling I'm running on a single monitor. Last time I published though, I published my project with multi-monitors, and the publish dialog showed on the second monitor. Web Publish apparently rememembers its screen position and so this modal dialog is off screen invisibly. You get the idea: Modal child dialog in Visual Studio and you basically have an IDE that looks like it's locked up. Menus and Window controls don't work - the IDE is just dead.

Thanks to rescue line tweet from Sayed Hashimi who pointed me in the right direction I was able to recover my hidden window by:

• Pressing Alt-Spacebar to bring up the child window menu
• Pressing the Size option to drag the window corner out onto the first monitor
• Then pulling the window in and properly resizing it

Voila my Web Publish window is back.

Note that the window menu also has a Move option on it - for the desktop window menu you can usually just use the arrow keys or the mouse to force the window into the first monitor, but that didn't seem to work for me. Only Size worked, but it's worth trying that first anyway - it seems that that should work.

Anyway, that's a nasty little bugger when it bites you, because it seems like a Visual Studio lockup. According to Sayed this is supposed to be fixed in Visual Studio Update 2 (which released just last week), but I'm running that and I still ran into it.