Recently upgraded my WinXP 32 bit to Win 7 64 bit. There’s been a few bumps in the road, and here’s one that cost me about an hour:

Sometimes I like to publish a website to the local IIS to be able to use it independent of visual studio.

So I went to Build -> Publish “ProjectName”

Put in http://localhost/projectname like I did on Windows XP.

No such luck, I need to be administrator of IIS metabase or front page extensions need to be installed.

So I did the Run As Administrator. Still nothing. I don’t think there is front page extensions anymore, nor do I really want to install them, so I cross that off.

I had to do the following:

Make sure IIS management studio is installed, then create a web site. Give it a unique ip or port number. I used 8080 as my port number.

THEN, I could publish to http://localhost:8080

So far so good. But when I go to the site, i receive:

Could not load file or assembly ‘System.Data’ or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format.

So I checked the .NET version, (Tip: That’s under Application Pools in IIS7, not under the site). It was set to 2.0, so that wasn’t it.

A little googling indicated it’s probably my project was a 32 bit app, and I was using a 64bit web server. Great. I didn’t wanna change the project because it works in production, so I don’t wanna mess with anything.

After some research and some good luck, I figured out how to make both work:

1. In IIS management studio, go to your computer (the top most node)

2. Run the Configuration Editor under Management.

3. Under Section select, System.ApplicationHost/ApplicationPools

4. Expand applicationPoolDefaults

5. Set Enable32bitApponWin64 to True.

!! Just like that it worked. You mileage may vary. I was expecting to atleast have to tell the application pool it was 32 bit, but I was surprised I avoided that step.

Well, that’s another transition to Windows 7 I survived, I’m still waiting for the big one.