Vlad Hrybok's Tech Notes - IIS7

Notes on Upgrading Windows XP MCE 2005/IIS5 to Vista/IIS7

Vlad Hrybok — Wed, 23 May 2007 20:20:28 GMT

Although usually I prefer to make a clean installation of a new OS to lose all the junk accumulated since last OS upgrade, this time I decided to upgrade our family Media Center box instead, because unlike my desktop the MCE box has just a few basic server apps, like IIS, email server, ORB, WebGuide, and of course MCE 2005.

Overall, upgrade was a success, but most of the drivers and applications had to be either upgraded or reinstalled. There were quite a few things to take care of:

Running Vista Upgrade Advisor was a good idea. It tells upfront which drivers, services and application will not, or may not work. The most important thing it told me was that I don't have enough space on drive C:, so since it was still an XP I used Norton Partition Magic to increased the C: partition size by 25 GB. I also downloaded some Vista drivers before starting the upgrade just in case my network card would not work after the upgrade.
Although ATI Catalyst software was not among those Vista Upgrade Advisor suggested to remove, the screen resolution settings were not preserved by the upgrade process. Moreover, standard MS ATI driver didn't support resolutions required by some HDTV sets. I had to visit ATI web site and download the latest driver and the Catalyst software. Once I've done that I was able to adjust the resolution back to what it used to be.
MCE settings partially survived. Scheduled series settings carried over fine, but Signal settings and Guide had to be specified again by going through the setup wizard. I had my recorded TV shows location in XP MCE changed from the default. While new MCE in Vista has found them, I still had to specified the location for new recordings. Thankfully, it was easy - the UI allowing to change the location of newly recorded shows is built into Vista's MCE app. Pictures and Music location settings have carried over with no problem.
The hardest part was to revive ASP.NET applications and sites after IIS was upgraded from IIS5 on XP to IIS 7.0 on Vista. The hardest problem was that caused by the remnants of some old version of .NET Framework 2.0. That caused application pools hosting .NET 2.0 to crash hard on the very first request while spitting out strange errors, like "The worker process failed to pre-load .Net Runtime version v2.0." to the application log. It took me two days of Internet searching to find the solution.

ASP.NET 1.1 applications were also all not working. I had to run aspnet_regiis.exe from the 1.1 Framework to bring them back to life.

In many cases I had to manually ACL folders containing ASP.NET applications with access rights for "NETWORK SERVICE" user account. I also had to change anonymous authentication account from IUSR_whatever to appPool identity.

The bottom line is migration of ASP.NET web apps was not trivial.
Both Orb and WebGuide stopped working after the upgrade. I upgraded ORB with no problem and uninstalled the WebGuide so I could install Vista-specific version of the WG. It all went fine - that's after I was done fixing all the IIS7 glitches.
dasBlog 1.9 - the software running this blog - ended up being incompatible with Vista. I had to move this blog to another server running good ole' Windows 2003/IIS 6.0. After moving the app to another server, which was free of surprises, the final challenge was to redirect links going to old blog location pointing to IIS7/Vista to the new one. Unlike IIS6, IIS7 does not have a UI where you could choose "A redirection to a URL" as a destination for your virtual directory. Redirection in IIS7 can be done but it requires running a command-line utility. Fortunately that worked.
Unlike IIS, UltiDev Cassini Web Server underpinning WebGuide4 went through upgrade precess as smooth as it can be.

Problem with Macromedia (Adobe) Flash Object on the ASP.NET Page Served by Visual Studio 2005 WebDev.WebServer2.exe

Vlad Hrybok — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 21:22:37 GMT

Recently I've been working on the small ASP.NET 2.0 app that has a page containing Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash object. When I tried debugging it with Visual Studio 2005 and its internal web server, the Flash piece has never been loaded by Internet Explorer - I am not even sure whether it was the Flash player that failed to load or the .SWF file. I wonder if anyone else had this issue. I could not check which component was not loaded because WebDev.WebServer2.exe serves only local applications, and I could not use an http tracer to see which request gets stuck.

I worked around the issue by switching to our own UltiDev Cassini for ASP.NET 2.0 for application debugging. It served all the bits and pieces required by Flash without a hitch.

Visual Studio.NET 2003, ASP.NET 1.1 and IIS7 on Vista x64

Vlad Hrybok — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 20:35:13 GMT

In the brave new world, where nearly all CPUs are 64 bit, and Vista x64 is poised to have a large market share, how many ASP.NET 1.1 developers will find themselves in the situation where IIS7 running on x64 OS can't create an application pool for .NET Framework 1.1, therefore making it impossible to debug ASP.NET 1.1 applications under IIS7 using Visual Studio.NET 2003? All because when looking for available ASP.NET versions, IIS7 is probably looking into 64 bit .NET Framework folder - "C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64", which only has 2.0 and 3.0 versions in it. Not knowing this would be the case, I recently installed Vista x64 on my newly upgraded Dev box and almost fainted when I realized I can't use VS.NET 2003 to debug legacy ASP.NET 1.1 apps. It took me a while to realize that our own Cassini Web Server for ASP.NET 1.1 may work just fine, because it has its own routines for discovering location of .NET Framework 1.1 files, and it can be used for debugging of ASP.NET 1.1 application in VS.NET 2003. I tried it a few days ago, and sure enough our little Cassini saved the day - Visual Studio.NET 2003 ran an ASP.NET 1.1 app on our Cassini in Debug mode without a hitch!

Microsoft Virtual Server R2 SP1 on Vista x64 and Intel Core 2 Duo CPU

Vlad Hrybok — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 19:29:12 GMT

Microsoft Virtual Server R2 SP Beta works really well on Vista x64 and Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 CPU, which has Virtualization support. Installer was not completely hands-off - I had to add CGI module to IIS7 manually - otherwise VSWebApp.exe was treated as downloadable file and not as CGI module. MS needs to update VS installer to automate this step.

Please note that although MS Virtual Server R2 Beta can run on Vista x64, it can't host 64-bit OSes. To host 64 bit OSes you would need free VmWare Server installed on x64 Windows 2003 Server, and either AMD 64 bit CPU or Intel EMT64 CPU with Virtualization Technology (VT) support (like Core 2 Duo E6300 or E6400 CPUs).