Some time ago, I tried to start up the IIS Management Console on my Vista machine and I received an exception. After trying a few quick fixes, I gave up. I had several VPC images that I worked from and I didn’t particularly need this machine to work when I had so many others.  However, I’ve been doing a great deal of development on this machine now, and having IIS working is obviously rather handy. So, I tracked down the exception and solved my problem. I thought I’d go ahead and chronical my adventures for anyone else who is having this issue and needs help.

So first of all, the error that was displayed when I started inetmgr was as follows:

---------------------------
Failed to connect
---------------------------
There was an error when trying to connect. Do you want to retype your credentials and try again?
Details:
Creating an instance of the COM component with CLSID {2B72133B-3F5B-4602-8952-803546CE3344}
from the IClassFactory failed due to the following error: 8007000d.
---------------------------
Yes   No
---------------------------

So I thought that this might be a configuration error. I tried to roll back to a known good configuration but appcmd failed with the following exception:

ERROR ( hresult:80070426, message:Command execution failed.
The service has not been started. )

I tried to start the service with a good old fashion iisreset command and the following exception occurred:

Attempting stop…
Internet services successfully stopped
Attempting start…
Restart attempt failed.
The IIS Admin Service or the World Wide Web Publishing Service, or a service dep
endent on them failed to start.  The service, or dependent services, may had an
error during its startup or may be disabled.

Once again, I thought I’d go into the services console and try to start IIS manually. After trying to start it manually, it failed, stating that a dependent service failed. So I looked at Windows Process Activation Services (WAS) and noticed it was stopped. I tried to start it manually and found the following:

—————————
Services
—————————
Windows could not start the Windows Process Activation Service service on Local Computer.
Error 13:
The data is invalid.
—————————
OK �
—————————

So I checked out the event log and found the following four entries:

First Event :

Log Name:      System
Source:        Service Control Manager
Date:          9/21/2008 11:52:00 PM
Event ID:      7001
Task Category: None
Level:         Error
Keywords:      Classic
User:          N/A
Description:
The World Wide Web Publishing Service service depends on the Windows Process Activation Service service which failed to start because of the following error:
The data is invalid.

Second Event:

Log Name:      System
Source:        Service Control Manager
Date:          9/21/2008 11:52:00 PM
Event ID:      7023
Task Category: None
Level:         Error
Keywords:      Classic
User:          N/A
Description:
The Windows Process Activation Service service terminated with the following error:
The data is invalid.

Third Event:

Log Name:      System
Source:        Microsoft-Windows-WAS
Date:          9/21/2008 11:51:59 PM
Event ID:      5005
Task Category: None
Level:         Error
Keywords:      Classic
User:          N/A
Description:
Windows Process Activation Service (WAS) is stopping because it encountered an error. The data field contains the error number.

Fourt Event:

Log Name:      System
Source:        Microsoft-Windows-WAS
Date:          9/21/2008 11:51:59 PM
Event ID:      5036
Task Category: None
Level:         Error
Keywords:      Classic
User:          N/A
Description:
The configuration manager for Windows Process Activation Service (WAS) did not initialize. The data field contains the error number.

I checked through my event logs and realized that this started happening after I had upgraded to SP1. I hadn’t recognized this as the issue because, as I said, don’t typically use IIS on this machine on a regular basis. I decided to go back to my initial assessment that this had to be configuration related. I started doing comparisons between configuration of a pure Vista installation vs a Vista machine with SP1. I found that the schema had changed during the install, but something had been left out.  The schema file was updated to add the configurationHistory configuration section, but a corresponding section definition was not added to the applicationHost.config file.  

Whether this was what was causing the problem or not, I knew this was going to cause a problem. I added the following configuration entry to the applicationHost.config file under the section group for “system.applicationHost”. 

<section name="configHistory" allowDefinition="AppHostOnly" overrideModeDefault="Deny" />

After this I started the WAS service, the World Wide Publishing Service and the IIS Admin Service. I opened up the IIS Management Console and everything was working just fine.

I’m not sure what exactly happened during the SP1 upgrade that caused this file to not be updated, but I’m pleased to report that all things are up and running again.

Related posts:

1. Enabling VS.NET 2008 to work with IIS 7.0
2. IIS 7.0 Error Support
3. ASP.NET 1.1, IIS 6.0 and 64-bit Windows

This is likely old ground for some, but I thought I’d cover it again just in case. As you may know Visual Studio allows you to create a new web site on IIS. However, there are some minor steps that you need to complete before it will work appropriately.

Let’s walk through this.

1. Open Visual Studio .NET 2008
2. Go to File | Web Site…
3. Click the Browse… button to choose a Location
   
4. Click on the Local IIS button on the left
   You’ll notice the IIS 6 Metabase and IIS Configuration Compatibility need to be
   installed as well as ASP.NET. The next steps we’ll go through will enable this for
   you.
5. Go to Start | Control Panel and click on the
   Programs and Features applet
6. Click on the Turn Windows features on or off button on the left
7. From the Windows Features window, select the IIS Metabase
   and IIS 6 configuration compatibility option under IIS 6 Management
   Compatibility as well as ASP.NET under Application
   Development Features
   
8. Click OK and wait as Windows configures the service
   
9. Once Windows is done configuring IIS, it may ask you to restart. Click Restart
   Now.
   
10. After rebooting, you should be able to walk through steps 1-4 again and create a
    Web site with the Local IIS option.
    

This should be all you need to do to enable Local IIS integration with VS.NET 2008.

Related posts:

1. IIS cannot start after upgrade to Vista SP1
2. IIS Security – Past and Present
3. Where can I find <feature x> in IIS 7.0 ?

Now that Beta 2 has been announced and IIS 7 is now publicly available to beta testers on both the Vista and Longhorn platforms, our new portal, IIS.NET is now open and live!  Many long hours were spent on this by some great guys here at Microsoft.  Be sure to stop by and tell them what you think of the site!

Related posts:

1. Live from Redmond
2. Longhorn is all over RSS