Publish Website Getting Empty Folder

Build your project (not rebuild) it will work :)

OR

Other workaround is publish in debug mode first then change settings and publish in release mode. it will surely work :)

In my case there was a little item in the .csproj file that I had to remove. I had to unload the project, edit the .csproj, then hunt down and remove the following XML tag:

<Target Name="GatherAllFilesToPublish">     
</Target>

Once I republished, all was well.

Try building the project in release mode first then publish.