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Just ran into this and thought I’d share.  If you are trying to connect to SQL Server from your Web application running on Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 and you’re getting a message that looks like this: Failed to generate a user instance of SQL Server due to failure in retrieving the user's local application data path. Please make sure the user has a local user profile on the computer. The connection will be closed. I can probably help you out.  The IIS team made a change to the default identity of the worker process.   Starting with IIS 7.5, Application Pools run with a unique identity based on the Application Pool name, rather than NetworkService – the default identity for IIS6 and IIS7.  The primary reason for...

Every time I talk with customers in meetings or at conferences I’m struck by how many cool amazing new capabilities IIS7 has.  I can go on for literally hours talking about the new features and benefits, and showing demos.  And with each new IIS7 Extension , the list of new features just gets bigger and bigger.  A few months ago I realized we didn’t have the top list of features written up anywhere, and so we started the process of distilling down the list to the top 10.  We almost made it!  We ended up with the top 12 reasons you should get IIS7 today.  Check them out here: http://www.iis.net/getstarted Over the next few weeks we’ll be adding a cool demo for each of the reasons to show the features in action. ...

Here are a few cool links I found today while catching up on my IIS reading:   URL Rewrite In case you missed it, the IIS7 URL Rewrite extension is now licensed for production use in its final beta release.  Deploy it today and get all the benefits from one of the most powerful IIS7 features around.  Use it to clean up URLs, provide extension-less URLs, fix canonicalization issues with your site to improve search ranking, redirect incoming users and much, much more.  This latest URL Rewrite release includes all new IIS Manager support for creating rewrite rules using templates, rule testing and more.  Speaking of the URL Rewrite extension, check out these community links: CarlosAg wrote a really awesome post on how to...

Dealing with server errors can be frustruating. Thankfully, IIS7 comes with many improvements to help diagnose errors when they occur, and help resolve them - however, its important that you know how to property use these capabilities. This post gives you what you need to know to troubleshoot IIS7 errors like a pro. Read all about it at http://mvolo.com/blogs/serverside/archive/2007/07/26/Troubleshoot-IIS7-errors-like-a-pro.aspx . Read More...

I've seen several posts asking the question: how do I turn off the "verify file exists" setting on handlers / script maps in IIS7. I must admit, this seems to not be as straightforward as it should be. Hopefully this post helps you out. The configuration setting for this feature is stored in the <handlers> section for each handler mapping, and is known as the resourceType attribute. For example: <add name="ASPClassic" path="*.asp" verb="GET,HEAD,POST" modules="IsapiModule" scriptProcessor="%windir%\system32\inetsrv\asp.dll" resourceType="File" /> For the ASP script map, we set resourceType="File" by default, so that the ASP engine won't get invoked...

I was reminded the other day just how many classic ASP applications and developers there are out there! The original ASP rocks, I remember experiencing it for the first time back in 1996/97 when it first came out with IIS3, and being amazed at how programmable it was compared to ColdFusion. I built many an application using Classic ASP, and there will always be a soft spot in my heart for it. :) There are a few changes in IIS7 which Classic ASP developers should be aware of. ASP not installed by default First things first! If you're moving from XP to Windows Vista / Longhorn Server, you may be getting this error: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- HTTP Error 404...