Enabling ASP.NET 2.0 in Vista RTM

One of the most concerned thing for developers before upgrading to Vista RTM is probably the uncertainty of development features in Vista RTM. Some of mostly asked questions, does the IIS still work the same way it used to be? Is Visual Studio 2005 fully compatible and running as expected? Can I still work with “http projects” in Visual Studio 2005?

Earlier this week, I had chance to get the Vista RTM bits and finally decided to upgrade my existing Windows XP to Vista (of course after full backup in case unexpected thing happened :).  Everything worked well including most existing applications, except one thing: ASP.NET doesn’t work at all.

This is quite surprising. If you installed Vista from scratch (clean install), you may have visit Scott Guthrie’s post and grab some tips to enable ASP.NET (IIS7) in Vista.

If you are upgrading from Windows XP to Vista like in my case, unfortunately you will find out that Scott’s technique didn’t work. The first step will fail — no matter how many times you tried. The “Enable ASP.NET” in Window Features will generate an error in the end of configuration like “An error has occured. Not all of the features were successfully changed”.

When you get that error message, the nightmare came. Vista RTM is just get out of the door last week, and there is no support or KB yet in this area.

In this post, I will share how I overcome this problem by manually performing extra steps to make ASP.NET works in Visual Studio 2005. Before I start, you should understand that Vista RTM installation comes with total security. That means all web development features are locked down.

The following steps will unlock the web development features so you can get back to your web development:

  1. Open “Services”. Now you can do this very easy by typing Services in the search textbox located at the bottom of start menu panel.
  2. Find “Windows Process Activation Service”. Change its Startup Type to Automatic, and “Start” the service.
  3. Next, find “World Wide Publishing Service”. Notice that you can not directly start this service because it is in “disabled” state. The trick is by changing the Startup Type to Automatic first, then you can start this service.
  4. Next, open “Command Prompt”. Again you can do this quickly by typing “cmd” in the search textbox.
  5. Run this command “aspnet_regiis -i” inside ASP.NET 2.0 Framework folder. This will re-register ASP.NET 2.0 handlers and mapping to all existing web applications.
  6. Finally, run this command “net start w3svc”. Your web server should be started perfectly at this time.
  7. Try to open one of your HTTP project in Visual Studio 2005 and run one of your webform. Here you go.

 Good luck and enjoy the best operating system ever.

Jimmy.

Comments

  1. Hi Keith,

    I did encounter this error in one of my development machine, however I think you can ignore the error.

    To ensure that your web application has been mapped correctly, bring up the Basic Settings of the web application in IIS Manager, then set the application pool to “ASP.NET 2″. There should be 3 predefined application pools after Vista upgrade.

    Once you set the above configuration successfully, you will be able to run the web application normally.

    Hope this helps,
    Jimmy.

  2. I am having the same error and when I go to basic settings, asp.net 2.0 is not an option. I really can’t reformat this machine without major headaches, so I am hoping someone has some info on how to fix

  3. I removed IIS to try and install it again, but it wouldn’t let me if I tried to install ASP.NET with it…
    It’s now sorted for me as I’ve just had some help from a very helpful guy at Microsoft… He said to do this…

    Would you be able to share the content of the section of %windir%system32inetsrvconfigapplicationhost.config?

    Delete the ASP.Net filters manually from the section of %windir%system32inetsrvconfigapplicationhost.config and try to reinstall ASP.Net along with IIS.

    It now all works for me… Hope this helps someone else… :)

  4. Thanks for the post.
    A couple of added points. I had trouble starting the “Windows Process Activation Service” service. Uninstalling from the Windows Feature tree list the item “Windows Process Activation Service” [Parent node near the bottom] then reinstalling (with all child items checked) allowed the Service (In the step 2 above) to be started.
    I also had to delete from the Jac’s post the extra iaspifilter entry in the configuration/system.webserver/isapiFilters node. I kept the entry that read:
    filter name=”ASP.NET_2.0.50727.210″ path=”C:WINDOWSMicrosoft.NETFrameworkv2.0.50727aspnet_filter.dll” enableCache=”true” preCondition=””

    The only other point much may be obvious to everybody here the cmd box that you open to reinstall .net via aspnet_regiis needs to be opened as an administrator.

  5. Make sure that you run the command prompt with “elevated privileges”, i.e. as an admin. Otherwise you won’t be able to do anything. Right click the command prompt shortcut -> Run as Admin -> Continue

  6. How did MS even release this thing in this kind of condition? They’ve managed to make the UI look so much more user-friendly but they UIs are so horribly broken that it’s worse than XP…worse than 2K in a lot of ways because nothing has been this buggy since WinME (although from an app standpoint, VS2005 was released in a pretty shameful state)

  7. Hi,I’v just installed vista on my new notebook but whenever i try to debug(F5) a project I get an error that “windows authentication is not enabled” and do’t know what to do.As I’m very new in IIS7 I can’t enable it.would u please help me?

  8. This whole experience is terrible. IIS won’t even let me install the IIS6 metabase without an error and a rollback.

    Whatever this means:
    CmdLine: [60]””C:WindowsSystem32inetsrviissetup.exe” /install Metabase”
    2007-09-14 16:04:16, Error CSI 0000062c (F) Done with generic command 7; CreateProcess returned 0, CPAW returned S_OK
    Process exit code 1053 (0x0000041d) resulted in success? FALSE
    Process output: [l:22 [22]”Failed = 0x8007041d

    “][gle=0x80004005]
    2007-09-14 16:04:16, Info CSI 0000062d@2007/9/14:20:04:16.606 CSI Advanced installer perf trace:
    CSIPERF:AIDONE;{81a34a10-4256-436a-89d6-794b97ca407c};Microsoft-Windows-IIS-Metabase, Version = 6.0.6000.16386, pA = PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE_INTEL (0), Culture neutral, VersionScope = 1 nonSxS, PublicKeyToken = {l:8 b:31bf3856ad364e35}, Type neutral, TypeName neutral, PublicKey neutral;280387776
    2007-09-14 16:04:16, Error CSI 0000062e (F) Failed execution of queue item Installer: Generic Command ({81a34a10-4256-436a-89d6-794b97ca407c}) with HRESULT HRESULT_FROM_WIN32(14109). Failure will not be ignored: A rollback will be initiated after all the operations in the installer queue are completed; installer is reliable (2)[gle=0x80004005]
    2007-09-14 16:04:34, Info CSI 0000062f End executing advanced installer (sequence 223)
    Completion status: HRESULT_FROM_WIN32(ERROR_ADVANCED_INSTALLER_FAILED)

    what a waste

  9. hi every one

    I want to ask any expert about when i get asp.20 code written on xp and I change my sytem to vist of course when I run it on vista i got more error How I can solve this problem??????

    Regards

    primary on programming :(

  10. Thanks, I just set up a new Windows Vista development computer and of course it would not let me run my asmx services. It gave .net 2.0 as an option in App Pool. Little did I realize that did not mean the ASP.net was installed.

    So thanks, it works fine now.

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