This is another rant post.
be warned.
I guess when you are playing with fire, you need to take into consideration that you might get burned.
Well I have been working on a Asp.net application recently. All went well except some minor irritating issues, not something surprising when dealing with betas.
Anyway, after developing on the ASP.net development server for a few days, the time had come to deploy it to the IIS, right?.
It just didn't work.
First I thought it must be some firewall/router issue. I am not that an network expert - Port 80 forwarding sounds like a good idea. It wasn't.
I took me some time to realize that not only my new shiny Ajax extensions Web app doesn't work, even a miserable default.html with some hello world typed into didn't show up.
http://localhost should get you into a default IIS page.
I just didn't show up anything.
OK, iisreset -> IIS couldn't start.
Damn.
Why didn't you say something???
I started digging into, googling like a crazy man.
On one site I found which wasn't really related to my issue, but gave me some useful info. I went and check the WAS service (The Windows Process Activation Service (WAS)) status, it was down and like the IIS couldn't go up. It just kept bubbling on some cryptic error code (13) and "Data is very bad" generic message.
Getting into event log yielded out no more information.
Well at that time, I said to myself, just reinstall the damn thing.
And after spending quality time with the install windows component window doing some trail and error. I finally managed to get down IIS and WAS.
I installed them again, and Yes it worked! I was an happy camper again.
I've got IIS.
This was 2 days ago.
Today I resumed my efforts to get the my app into IIS, after some working with Inetmgr, I got an error of writing to some config files, the config file got messed up, and like a tower made of cards, the IIS died and of course his best friend the WAS.
I got really annoyed.
Again uninstall and install - at least I'm getting expert with that window.
But now I've got more info than the first time. (I guess I missed the error window prompting of the config file writing failure).
So now more focused search found the reason for the all mess.
http://blogs.iis.net/wonyoo/archive/2008/03/24/applicationhost-config-file-getting-corrupted-when-onecare-or-forefront-is-running.aspx
The culprit is the Forefront application, believe it or not.
the link I posted in here instructs us of a workaround until the Forefront team will publish a fix for it.
So far so good, applying the workaround seems to solve the issue.
Ariel