Ken, Folks,
I'm not going as far as using rare tools that I have never seen or used before, not yet anyway. I shouldn't have to do this just to get some "hello world" apps running under IIS. This morning I tried using a GoDaddy tool called Plesk to configure IIS, app pools and ASP.NET, but it provides meagre and confusing features and after another 2 hours or suffering I finished up with ... 500 Server error. What a surprise! New experimental track ... I have a near virgin Win2008 server sitting on my left which will become my new web/file server in the coming weeks. I am now trying to get my "hello world" apps running in IIS on that clean machine. If they work there but not on GoDaddy then I have some more clues. Pretty bad so far. On a Win2003 server it would take me 20 minutes to get web sites and ASP.NET apps all working. I have been working for 2 hours now on my clean Win2008 box with little to no success. I couldn't even get a plain htm web page to appear on the Default Web Site without giving IUSR modify permissions to the web folder (I've never had to do that before). If I don't, then I get an authentication prompt to access the htm page. I'm also getting permission errors on web.config even though that file is not used. <rant>Overall ... generally speaking ... something f...@#$ing f...@#$ed up has happened to Win2008. All of the familiar steps I've used for years to get IIS and ASP.NET working are now worthless and I'm getting conflicting and unhelpful errors in unimaginable places. My income for the last year has probably dropped by 15% due to the time I waste configuring and debugging kits, Windows, IIS and frameworks. My productive time as a software developer is being swallowed in frustrating never-ending "maintenance" tasks. Today is a typical example. I will soon spend more time doing unpaid "configuring" that I will writing software. I think there's a special black-ops department in Microsoft who have a KOAS style shield on the wall which is engraved with (translated from Latin) "Confound the bastards". Every product that is released is passed through this secret group who add bizarre complexity and gotchas before it reaches the public.</rant> Greg
