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Windows Vista, Visual Studio 2008 and IIS7

Jan 28, 2009 archive

After upgrading to Windows Vista, I’ve had many problems with running Visual Studio 2008 and IIS 7 on it. This blog post discusses some problems and how to solve them.

Vista seems to focus more on security than developer functionality. This means that you may have to install a lot of additional software to make IIS 7 and Visual Studio 2008 behave the way you expect.

For instance, IIS URL Rewriting now requires that you have the following installed:

  • Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (a big recommendation if you use VS 2008)
  • Web Management Tools (activated in the Control Panel)
  • IIS Management Compatibility (activated in the Control Panel)
  • IIS Metabase and IIS 6 configuration compatibility (activated in the Control Panel)
  • IIS Management Console
  • IIS Management Script and Tools
  • IIS Management Service
  • World Wide Web Services
  • Application Development Features
  • .NET Extensibility
  • ASP.NET
  • ISAPI Extensions
  • ISAPI Filters
  • Security
  • Basic Authentication
  • Windows Authentication

If you have the same problems as I have had with URL rewriting, I hope that installing and configuring the tools above helps you out.