Azure WebJob has been very helpful to help me running small automated tasks without the hassle of creating VMs or worker roles. Moreover, if you are using a recent version of Visual Studio (from Update 3, I think), you will also get some tooling support for publishing WebJob to Azure Website directly from inside the IDE. It is much more convenient than the old way: building, zipping, going to the portal, deleting the old build and uploading the new one.
However, I then got a strange problem while publishing the WebJob of one project. The error message simply said: “an error occurred while creating the WebJob schedule,” which is not useful for finding a solution at all. I have tried to search around the Internet for a solution, but cannot find any. Even stranger, I can publish that project normally to my staging websites, but not to the production one.
Eventually I found out that I have not set up any deployment credentials for my production Azure Website, and setting one solve the problem completely. I guess the tooling need that credentials to upload the WebJob’s binaries to the website.
I cost me days and days, and I found the solution accidentally after I had tried to connect to the Website using FTP, which requires deployment credentials. I hope this blog post will save you sometime should you got the same problem. I also hope that the tooling will show better error messages next time.
…\projectfolder\packages\Microsoft.Web.WebJobs.Publish.1.0.2\tools\webjobs.console.targets(110,5): Error : An error occurred while creating the WebJob schedule: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
is this the error you had? this worked 2 weeks ago. totally clueless about this. also, the latest template is focused on subscribing to queues (which i don’t use in this example) and lacks the famous “put your code here” spot. i want to run my job every 5 mins – so the setting is not “on demand” but “scheduled”.
cheers,
Gregor
It’s 2015-10-02 I am still experiencing this issue.
The only solution that worked for me was going back to nuget package Microsoft.Web.WebJobs.Publish 1.0.1 (Monday, August 18 2014 )
It’s kind of sad that this issue has not been fixed in one year.
Changing the jobRecurrenceFrequency in webjob-publish-settings.json to “Hour” worked for my https://error404.atomseo.com project!
I had the same problem and it turned out that publish process failed because I set it to recur every 10 minutes while the app was meant to run in free tier. As MS describes here:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/websites-dotnet-deploy-webjobs/
one can deploy with all frequencies other than those defined in minutes.