I always love to use beta software, and with that comes the occasional, “oh great, what just happened?” moment.

I repaved my main machine last week, and really loving how Visual Studio 11 is shaping up, only installed that. Yesterday, I decided I needed to install Visual Studio 2010, did that, then ran the Web Platform Installer from www.asp.net/downloads to update the installation. This included IIS 7.5 Express.

The process went fine, until today, when I started working and none of my MVC 3/4 sites would work, even small “delme” projects. The browser would show a 500 Internal Server Error, with no other messages. Bingling, for IIS 8.0 Express, I ran across this page, http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/1286/iis-80-express-readme/#KnownIssues, which states that “Side-by-side installations of IIS 8.0 Express and IIS 7.5 Express are not supported.” It goes on to say that the IIS 7.5 Express installer doesn’t check to see if IIS 8.0 Express is installed, so, there is the rub.

Fortunately the article goes on to talk about how to fix the issue.

1. Open Control Panel –> Programs and Features

2. Uninstall IIS 7.5 Express

3. Right click IIS 8.0 Express and click “Repair”

4. Open Registry Editor and delete the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\IISExpress\7.5

I did all that, and my pages are working again. All better now.

James

I thought I’d try out the Developer Preview of Visual Studio 2011 as I had heard there was round-tripping between VS 2010 and VS 2011. After opening a VS 2010 project in VS 2011, I was presented with the Visual Studio Conversion Wizard, which I thought was fine. I converted the project and started working. Trying to open the project in VS 2010, I was shown the Conversion Wizard again, and thinking this was normal went through the steps.

However, every time I would open the project in VS 2010, I would still get the Conversion Wizard. This was getting irritating so decided to do some spelunking into the .sln and .csproj files with Notepad2 to see what was up.

I noticed in the .csproj file in the first <PropertyGroup> section there is an element, <FileUpgradeFlags> which had a value of 40. I removed the value, so the entry is now <FileUpgradeFlags></FileUpgradeFlags>. Saving the .csproj file then opening in VS 2010, the Conversion Wizard doesn’t appear now, so I think the problem is solved.

Does anyone know why this happens? So much for using software that isn’t even in beta yet.

-James