Missing ASP.NET tab in IIS on Windows Server 2003

This post is more than 16 years old.

Posted at 15:31 on 14 January 2008

One thing that's been at the back of my mind since I upgraded to Windows Server 2003 is that the ASP.NET tab in IIS had taken a walk. Even running aspnet_regiis -i did nothing to solve the problem. Up till now I had no cause to fix it, but today I had to troubleshoot one of our apps that is (still!) using ASP.NET 1.1. This meant I needed to configure it to run version 1.1 in order to debug it using Visual Studio 2003. Might as well get to the bottom of this while I'm at it.

It turns out the problem is something to do with VMWare Server, which I also have running on the same machine, running a couple of instances of Ubuntu for my PHP work. For some reason this conflicts with the ASP.NET tab on Windows Server 2003. Fortunately, a quick Google search led me to this post, which has a fix described in the comments.

So, if you have the same problem:

  1. Stop IIS using iisreset /stop
  2. Open the file C:\WINDOWS\system32\inetsrv\MetaBase.xml in Notepad.
  3. Find and delete the line that says Enable32BitAppOnWin64="TRUE"
  4. Restart IIS using iisreset /start
  5. If you still don't see your ASP.NET tab, aspnet_regiis -i should now work.