I Could Not Publish My Web App via FTP In Visual Studio. *SOLVED!*

Google and I were able to resolve a bizarre issue with Visual Studio 2013 (and 2015, for that matter) Community Edition.

Here is the Microsoft Connect link.

The message I was seeing during the attempt to publish via FTP was, "The components for communicating with FTP servers are not installed." Turns out that the issue was that I recently added a newer-format Microsoft Access file in the App_Data directory.

The fix was to convert the Access database file to the older "mdb" format. After doing that, the ability for me to publish the site was restored.

Now isn't that crazy? Silly, Visual Studio!