I have been developing ASP.net Web Applications with Visual Studio 2005 on Windows Vista for a month or so now, and it kind of works. But I have been looking forward to the Visual Studio 2005 SP1, so I was excited to see that Windows Update had tried to install it last night. The install failed, but I set out to figure out what it would take to get it to work on Vista...

The Service Pack can be downloaded manually here. I fetched it and ran it to see what the problem was. It ended up showing me an error box, saying that if I had installed support for Web Application Projects, then I needed to uninstall it before installing the Service Pack, as Web Application Projects are now an integral part of VS 2005 development. I had indeed done that, so I went to the control panel, uninstalled Web Application Projects, and then tried again. Bingo! This time it installed.

Next, I fired up Visual Studio to see if my Web Application Projects would still work. However, I didn't get far - Visual Studio immediately informed me that I needed to get the Visual Studio 2005 Vista SP1. Here is how it is described on the page where you download the regular SP:

"For developers using Visual Studio 2005 on Windows Vista, Microsoft is in current development on an update to Service Pack 1 called the ‘Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Vista Refresh Beta’. This update builds on the improvements made in SP1 and delivers a first class experience for developers wanting to take advantages of the new features in Windows Vista. The Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Update for Windows Vista is expected to ship after the consumer availability of Windows Vista in Q1 of 2007 and is now available in beta."

Wel, I dont have the patience to wait for this to RTM, so I figured I would install the beta. You can get it here.

I went ahead and downloaded the beta. The installation instructions state "On Vista, ensure UAC is turned on". I have turned UAC off, it is the most annoying thing Microsoft created since the Office Paper Clip. But I didnt want to mess up the install, so I turned it back on (which requires a reboot), and then installed the beta (you need to run it as Administrator). That went smoothly, so I turned UAC off again, rebooted, and then started Visual Studio. Cool! No warning messages this time!

Now it was time to see if I could still load my Web Application Projects, so I selected a solution to open and.... it didnt work! Visual Studio told me that I had to install something called "IIS 6 Metabase and IIS 6 Configuration Compatibility". I googled that phrase and ended up on this page. It is a good resource that tells you all the steps needed to run Web Application Projects with IIS (not the built in Development Web Server). One of the steps is to turn on the above mentioned compatibility setting, which you do from the Control Panel, the procedure is well described in the page mentioned above. So, I turned on the compatibilty and tried again!

Lo and behold, this time it worked! As of now, I am back to developing, running and debugging Web Application Projects in Visual Studio against my local IIS, but now with SP1 and the Vista SP1 beta...