Did you know? - Changing ASP.NET Version restarts IIS

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Here's a little something I learned the other day.

If you go to the ASP.NET tab and change the ASP.NET version for an application pool this will not only reset the application pool, but the entire IIS. I was a bit surprised at first, but investigating the matter showed that there was a pretty solid architectural decision behind this.

As most "bugs" this turned out to be quite well documented once you know where to look. It's actually mentioned in the aspnet_regiis documentation.

The reason it is documented under aspnet_regiis is because this is also a rather good alternative if you wish to reconfigure an application pool, but not cause an IIS reset.

You do it by running the following two commands:

aspnet_regiis -s w3svc/<instance>/root -norestart
iisapp /a /r

/ Johan