Testing websites locally on Vista Part II

Published Jun 22, 2007

Peter beat me to the post already, but instead of just leaving these thoughts in the comments, I figured I should add my two cents in a dedicated post as there a couple other things to take note of if a) you're not running as an Admin in Vista and/or b) you want to debug easily with Vista and IIS7.

First off, before hitting Peter's post, go to ScottGu's post. It tells you the essential step of making sure you've installed the "IIS 6 Management Compatibility" option within IIS7 (as ScottGu states, it "installs an API for the new configuration system that is compatible with the old Metabase APIs (which is what VS 2005 uses)").

As well, it'll help you if you've continued to run as a non-Admin on Vista with UAC enabled (both Peter and I have given up on this and are running as Admins with UAC off - the horror). I attempted for a month or so to use Vista with UAC etc., but the deal breaker was when I discovered that I couldn't drag and drop files into Visual Studio; nor could I open a project using the sln file. I'll hold off on UAC until stuff like Visual Studio is upped to use it reasonably (however, for those that want to use this as another reason to slam Vista, my love-hate relationship continues, but whenever I have to do something on my WinXP machine, I cringe...thus, there's a whole lot more love right now than hate).

In addition, I've found that in order to enable debugging, I need to add the following two steps:

Set your application pool for the site to the Classic .NET AppPool.
Enable Windows Authentication so that you can debug the site (haven't taken the time to figure out why this particular combination works, but suffice it to say, out of all the posts out there explaining how to get going with debugging with IIS7, this is the only thing that really matters). You'll get a "Challenge-based and login redirect-based authentication cannot be used simultaneously" alert, but ignorantly ignore this and you'll be fine.

UPDATE: I just found out in the writing of this post, that there is now a Visual Studio patch that fixes the Visual Studio F5 debugging of IIS7Applications on Vista.

NOTE: I LOVE being able to run multiple sites at one time. Bliss!