My ASP.NET app won't run - why?

[Guest]

Hi;

This is a two part question. The first is we hit a case where a user on
Windows 2003 installed .NET and IIS, but not the IIS .NET extensions. How can
we programatically check for this so we can have our setup program tell the
user this is a problem? And is there a way to then install this ourselves?

Second, when out ASP.NET app is installed and won't run - is there a way to
run some program or look in one place that will tell us why? Figuring this
out remotely is going to be a giant pain - especially as a lot of our users
tend to not be technical.

--
thanks - dave
david_at_windward_dot_net
http://www.windwardreports.com

Cubicle Wars - http://www.windwardreports.com/film.htm

 

[Brennan Stehling]

David,

Since the ASP.NET extensions are not on you will have a hard time with
detecting it simply because no HTTP Module run under the ASP.NET
runtime will run for you.

What you can do is use the MSBuild Community Tasks which include
support for working with IIS.

http://msbuildtasks.tigris.org/

The ones you will be interested in are related to the AppPool. You can
create a script which will check if the desired AppPool exists and is
configured for ASP.NET 2.0 and if it is not it can create it. If it
fails to create it, you can generate a message telling them about the
likely error, like not having ASP.NET extensions installed.

Brennan Stehling
http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/

 

[Brennan Stehling]

I am pretty sure that MSBuild is included with the .NET 2.0 runtime.
You can have an MSI installer run a script as a part of the
installation which will use MSBuild. You can also specify .NET 2.0 as
a requirement for the MSI installer.

The .NET 2.0 requirement will help the user with the .NET 2.0
installation. In Visual Studio these projects are known as Setup
projects. When you have add one of these projects to your solution
right-click on the project and look at the View menu. You will be
interested in the Custom Actions which you can take during the Install,
Commit, Rollback and Uninstall steps. You can have it run a script or
even an assembly from the Application Folder which will look for the
necessary dependencies.

For the Setup projects I use, I add the Primary Output of the
Application Folder in the Filesystem View which will detect that it
requires .NET 2.0.

Brennan Stehling
http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/