Installing IIS7 on Windows Vista

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For little more than a week I'm running build 5365 of Windows Vista on my Toshiba Tecra M4. This build is one of the latest milestones of Windows Vista before making beta 2 available to the public. As beta 2 is expected to be suitable for testing by a large audience some of the blocking issues have been resolved in this build. It's by far the best performing one I've been using over the last months. In another couple of weeks - when I'm sure all my applications are running fine on Windows Vista - I will switch to Windows Vista for my production machine.

When configuring this machine as my development workstation this week I had to "enable" Internet Information Services 7. IIS 7 can be considered as the do-it-all solution for applications to communicate over open Internet-based technologies (HTTP-protocol). IIS 7 is a major enhancement to the Windows Web server and plays a central role in unifying the Web platform (ASP.NET, WCF and Windows SharePoint Services). The key pillars of the IIS 7 release are:

  • Unified platform delivering a single, consistent developer and administrator model for Web solutions.
  • Enhanced security and smaller, independent components to reduce attack surface.
  • Flexible extensibility to enable customization and extension.
  • Simplified problem resolution through powerful diagnostic and troubleshooting.

More info on the Windows Vista developer story can be found in this MSDN Article.

Windows Vista Ultimate comes out of the box with all the functionality for at home, on the go and at the office on board. You only have to enable the feature.
The way to install IIS7 successfully on Windows Vista is a little different from Windows XP, but still straightforward. Below you can find a walkthrough on the install of IIS 7 on Windows Vista.

You can install IIS7 via the Control Panel > Programs > Installed Programs. Another way to get to the same screen is through Start > Computer > Change or Remove a program. See the image below. 

After clicking Change or Remove a program the Currently installed programs screen will pop-up. See the image below. Then click on Programs (highlighted).

From the Installed Programs window you will have 4 icons to click. Choose the Windows Features and double click.

 

Then the User Account Control (UAC) comes into play and warns the user that "an unudentified program wants access to your computer". Choose "Continue" and then "Allow" to move on with the installation.

Next the "Turn Windows features on or off" window (see below) will pop-up. To turn on a windows feature - in this case the Internet Information Services feature - click the check box.

A filled box means that only part of the feature is turned on.

Now IIS 7 is enabled on Windows Vista.

If you already have installed Visual Studio 2005 then you need to register ASP.NET with IIS. This can be done by running the aspnet_regiis -i command from the command line. As you typically are not running Windows Vista as an administrator executing this command from the command line will fail due to not having sufficient rights to execute the command. A simple workaround is right clicking the Visual Studio 2005 Command prompt and Run as administrator. Allow the program to run and then type aspnet_regiis -i. ASP.NET (2.0.50727) will then be registered in IIS 7.

Tags: Microsoft, IIS, Windows Vista.