james mckay dot net
because there are few things that are less logical than business logic

Missing ASP.NET tab in IIS on Windows Server 2003

.NET • 9 comments • 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.
Posted at 15:31 on 14 January 2008.

9 comments:

  • # Reply from Reinhard Brongers at 00:46 on 23 Feb 2008

    Thank you, your post just saved me from pulling my hairs out 🙂
    I had the same scenario (having to support an antique .NET 1.1 app). You’re tip did the trick!
    Regards, Reinhard

  • # Reply from Rico at 15:07 on 23 Feb 2008

    Thanks for sharing your solution. Worked!

  • # Reply from berberecho123 at 15:01 on 23 Apr 2008

    It works!!! Thanks guy 🙂

  • # Reply from John Seger at 16:00 on 25 Jul 2008

    Thanks for the helpful insructions. I too ignored it until I needed to change it. Worked great.

    John

  • # Reply from kamal at 21:04 on 3 Aug 2008

    thanks thanks haks you save me
    😆

  • # Reply from Jak at 18:32 on 22 Apr 2009

    Oh Yeah!! You are the MAN!

  • # Reply from surendar/ jagadesh at 07:20 on 2 Jul 2009

    😆

    This helps very much

  • # Reply from Carlos Araujo at 18:20 on 6 Jul 2009

    Thanks, you helped a Brazilian programmer.

  • # Reply from subash at 16:28 on 19 Jul 2009

    Thanks! .. but for me Windows XP professional so the said file is not found.

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