Visual Studio Publish stuck at Adding ACL's for path

I had the same problem and it turns out, that the web application that I deployed had accumulated lots of user-specific directories and files in a custom directory for uploads / report files / etc. Visual Studio checks and updates the ACLs for every file and directory and that is why it takes so long if there are many of them.

Check for directories with a huge amount of user-generated content or other content with lots of files and check if you can safely delete them (for example if those files are only created temporarily - like it had been the case here).

After cleaning up the directory on the web server the deployment is almost instant for incremental updates, which have been very slow before the cleanup process.

It seems you have too many files and it takes to much time. I resolved same issue by adding following line to .pubxml file.

<IncludeSetACLProviderOnDestination>False</IncludeSetACLProviderOnDestination>

First of all unload your project (Right click on project and find unload project)And then open your .pubxml file and add

<IncludeSetACLProviderOnDestination>False</IncludeSetACLProviderOnDestination>

under

 <PropertyGroup>

which should look like

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><!--This file is used by the publish/package process of your Web project. You can customize the behavior of this processby editing this MSBuild file. In order to learn more about this please visit http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=208121. --><Project ToolsVersion="4.0" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">  <PropertyGroup>    <IncludeSetACLProviderOnDestination>False</IncludeSetACLProviderOnDestination>