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Robert Shelton's Blog

Struggling to make sense of it all....

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How to: Setup IIS on a Vista box for publishing ASP.NET Applications

Well, I just spent a frustrating 30 minutes, trying to get an ASP.NET Application deployed using Visual Studio 2008 to my localhost (local IIS server) on my development machine. At this point, I've tried so many things, that I can't remember all of the combinations, so I am going to give you the steps that I found on Arian Kulp's Blog (found here), which I believe were the steps that I used to get it running.

I have to tell you, as many of my frequent readers know, I spend most of my time in SharePoint development world and hadn't tried to build an ASP.NET application in VS 2008, to deploy to my local IIS instance. I was shocked that I had to go through so much to get it done. I just assumed that Visual Studio would pop-up a wizard of some sort asking me if I wanted to enable that feature on my machine. Silly me! Angry

If anyone knows of a simpler set of steps, please respond to the blog entry with them, I will fire up a clean installation of my development machine (VPC actually) and try it, to confirm for everyone that the steps are accurate.

- As my blog title indicates, I am just "struggling to make sense of it all!" Some days it is more of a struggle than others, and today was just ONE OF THOSE DAYS!

~ Robert Shelton

Technorati Tags: ASP.NET,Visual Studio 2008,How to article

Saturday, February 16, 2008 3:21 PM

Your Comments.

# re: How to: Setup IIS on a Vista box for publishing ASP.NET Applications
I struggled a bit too when I first started moving my ASP.Net apps to a Vista development machine. Not sure if you're using a website project or web application project, but I generally use web application projects. For those, it's as simple as going to the project properties, web tab, select "Use IIS Web Server" and then click the button "Create Virtual Directory". Either way, one thing I also do is use the Classic .NET AppPool in IIS7 as opposed to the DefaultAppPool. For the Classic .NET AppPool, I have the Managed Pipeline Mode set to "Classic" and I also change the Identity to use my own user id, rather than the default NetworkService account. I'm okay with this for my dev machine. Just keep in mind that depending on your production environment, or if you're using a third-party host, you'll likely be running ASP.Net in a medium trust environment. This setup works for me and I didn't have to go through any of the steps mentioned in the other blog you linked to. I started off that way and I think I just made it more complicated than it needed to be.

Left by Glenn Wiley at 2/16/2008 10:43 PM
# re: How to: Setup IIS on a Vista box for publishing ASP.NET Applications
I just tried a simple VS 2008, New/Project (not web site), ASP.Net 3.5, under my newly minted Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edtion RTM virtual server and had no problem. Since I am eventually going to try to install MOSS 2007 SP1 on this particular VM, when I was setting up Windows 2008 Server, I added the IIS role and somehow managed to set all the checkboxes for IIS 6.0 as well as the newer IIS 7.0. Perhaps the Windows Server 2008 team had a chance to learn from the problems/issue that the Vista team encountered and fixed them prior to RTM? I'll try the same thing on Vista Ultimate, but I should warn you that I've just installed Vista SP1 (official release), so "your mileage may vary" may apply. :-)

Left by Fred Morrison at 2/18/2008 12:58 PM
# re: How to: Setup IIS on a Vista box for publishing ASP.NET Applications
Thanks guys,

The experience may be due to two pieces in the formula:

1. I didn't have IIS installed when I install Visual Studio, which means that neither ASP.NET nor WCF (which is a part of the problem here) were registered during the initial VS installation.

2. I migrated a WCF Web Service (origianlly built/hosted on a Windows XP Dev box), which was the project that I was now trying to move to a Vista Hosted dev. box.

When I rebuilt my Dev Box (VPC Image) and install IIS before Visual Studio, I didn't have ANY PROBLEMS. I gues I am still a bit frustrated by the fact that the VS IDE knows what the problem is visa-ve Installing IIS and Configuring it, but offers no help to do it, other than a help-file link. I guess I was expecting more from the IDE than I should have, but I have gotten spoiled over the years by all of the the things that the VS IDE does for me as a developer. Maybe the word is lazy!

Either way, I want to try to figure out the right steps of installation that causes this to happen, so that I can blog on it for the next "Poor Sap" who runs into this.

Thanks for your feedback and documenting your experiences. It made me go back an re-evaluate what I was doing.

~ Robert Shelton

Left by Robert Shelton at 2/18/2008 1:09 PM
# re: How to: Setup IIS on a Vista box for publishing ASP.NET Applications
I tried the exact same type of project (New/Project/ASP.Net Application 3.5) using VS 2008 under Vista Ultimate Service Pack 1 and it worked just fine, the same as under Windows Server 2008 (see my earlier posting). I did have to clear the "Disable Script Debugging" checkbox under Internet Explorer Options, but even having it set didn't interfere with the correct execution of the web page. Do you want me to try anyting else, either in Vista SP1 or Server 2008 such as New/Web Application instead of New/Project/ASP.Net Application for the sake of comparison?

Left by Fred Morrison at 2/18/2008 1:12 PM
# re: How to: Setup IIS on a Vista box for publishing ASP.NET Applications
I recently had this same issue, but my experience was trying to Publish to a remote host. In the past Front Page Extensions were installed on the remote server and Publishing a button click. In IIS7 however Front Extensions have been discontinued. What has replaced Front Page extension is literally Publishing via FTP to a particular directory that is setup as an Application.

What I cannot figure out is, how do you publish to a remote folder which has not been setup as an application.

There doesn't seem to be a wizard in Visual Studio 2008 for doing this.

Left by Damon Sanchez at 1/9/2009 11:01 AM
# re: How to: Setup IIS on a Vista box for publishing ASP.NET Applications
D U D E S:

Here is the holy grail to fix this stuff for remotley Publishing your Web Apps from Visual Studio 2008?

http://www.iis.net/downloads/default.aspx?tabid=34&g=6&i=1602

Left by Damon Sanchez at 1/9/2009 11:17 AM

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