Vista RTM and Visual Studio

 

While it is completely unsupported by Microsoft, I ran into a few issues dealing with IIS and ASP.NET projects in Visual Studio 2003 along with Visual Studio 2005.  Note that through all of this (and in general) I run with UAC turned off.

First off, it's required that the IIS6 Compatibility Layer be installed otherwise none of this will work.

After installing both VS2003 andd VS2005 (in that order), I was unable to install anything dealing with IIS from the "Programs and Features" control panel.  After several hours of trying various things, I finally found the solution.  I had to uninstall the .NET Framework v1.1, after which I could install any of the IIS options available to me.

I then re-installed .NET Framework v1.1 and ran into the second issue.  Every time I attempted to open an ASP.NET 2.0 project, it would ask me if I wanted to configure the server to use ASP.NET 2.0, even though the application directory was already setup to do so.

At the Visual Studio command prompt, I noticed that the Root version of .NET was version 1.1 .  After several attempts at aspnet_regiis in various combinations, I was able to get things working correctly by doing the following:

  1. VS2003 command prompt: aspnet_regiis -u
  2. VS2005 command prompt: aspnet_regiis -ua
  3. VS2003 command prompt: aspnet_regiis -i
  4. VS2005 command prompt: aspnet_regiis -i

It appears whichever framework is installed last becomes the root, and for the life of me, I could not figure out a way to change that without resorting to the above.

At this point, everything was fine in ASP.NET 2.0, however any ASP.NET 1.1 project would crash IIS upon attempting to load the project via the VS2003 IDE.  This was solved by installing the .NET Framework 1.1 SP1 patch.

After all of that, both VS2003 and VS2005 are living happily beside each other, though I am still unable to get server-side debugging working with VS2003.  For help getting sever-side debugging working in VS2005, see my post below.