In Visual Studio 2017 - Build > Publish Website has stopped working - visual-studio-2017

I have a web forms project in Visual Studio 2017 which I have been successfully updating and publishing for a number of years. Today, after doing a mass search/replace to update references to HTTP to HTTPS where maybe 100+ files updated, the Build > Publish Website has stopped working.
"Build" and "Rebuild" still seems to work fine, but when I click Build > Publish Website, simply nothing happens. Nothing appears in the output and no errors. Same if I right-click on the website in solution explorer and choose the Publish option there.
I have another website project in VS2017 and fortunately that one still works, so the issue seems to be limited to this particular solution.
Does anyone have any ideas?

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where tf shows it is running the 2017 TF.exe
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What causes VS2017 to refuse to show VSTS projects?
I experienced the same behavior today with version 15.9.5.
I also tried other options like deleting the VS related folders in %LocalAppData%, etc. to no avail.
The solution is to remove your account from within Visual Studio by selecting 'Account Settings' from the drop-down after clicking your name in the upper-right. Now remove the VSTS account, restart Visual Studio, enter your VSTS credentials anew and voila.

How to publish a website in Visual Studio 2017

I am migrating from Visual Studio 2008 to VS 2017.
In 2008 I had a menu item: Build -> Publish Website.
I configured that to put the website on a share on the webserver so I pretty much could use that menu item to deploy to the test server so the users could test.
I cannot find that menu option on 2017.
The functionality seems to be moved to the Publish Web Site Tool described here:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/377y0s6t.aspx#thepublishwebsiteutility
I can not find how to install this. I can not find it in the Visual Studio Installer utility.
I can find instructions for publishing, but those instructions include creating the project from scratch. I need to do this on an existing project.
Visual Studio 2017 has these features from the Build menu...
Or, right-click your project...
A wizard will start asking how you want to publish your project. There is ample documentation for this on the web.

VS2017 Web Publish Preview - unable to exclude files

When publishing a web application in Visual Studio 2017 Enterprise I can do a preview on the files that are changed by clicking the preview link. The window comes up and I can uncheck files I dont want BUT, there is only a cancel button, and I am not able to update the file list.
There use to be the ability to click Publish from that view to only update the selected files but now that is no longer the case.
Is there an alternative "tools" way in Visual Studio 2017 Enterprise to publish and exclude certain files from being updated for example the web.config?
I don't have an alternative tool however according to the forums this has been patched and will be deployed in the next public release (15.3).
https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/content/problem/26373/publish-preview-not-allowing-selective-publish-of.html
I've been getting around this by copying the files that I don't want and replacing them back after I publish.
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Additionally, the Web Essentials toolbar doesn't appear in Edge when I run a website from within Visual Studio. Hitting Ctrl doesn't make it appear.
What's going on here? Looks like Web essentials didn't install correctly and isn't working.
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I had the same issue with extension downloaded from the web.
So i installed it from the marketplace and it works just fine.