Today I though I would be slick & install Exchange Server 2003 beta on my main home box.  "This should be easy!" I told myself...

Well, to install Exchange the box needs to be in a domain (or be a domain controller itself). 

Duh!

Even I know that.  So I go through the great "Manage Your Server" wizard in Server 2003 and made my box a "First Server" which set up everything for me.  DNS, DHCP, Active Directory, it all went great. 

By now I'm really impressed with the usability of Server 2003.  I haven't set up a domain network since my NT4 days, and its simply amazing the progress that MS has made in the administration configuration...

So I get everything working, and realize that it's time for me to go to school.  Oh yeah.  Did I mention that I have my final project presentation & final exam in my C# class today?  I'm pumped.  I know the material and my final project is a killer one.  One of my favorite aspects of my project is a web service that scrapes weather.com & grabs all kinds of info based on a zipcode or a city name. I learned tons about Regex while making it, and I'm quite proud.

I show up in the lab a bit early to test my deployment package (my final project is actually a WinForm client app).  After a bit of quirkiness getting the 7.1 MFC bits onto the demo machine that I needed for my unmanaged C++ DLL I load up my client and test it out.

But I'm getting an error with my web services.  None of them work at all.

Isn't that odd?

So I connect to the .asmx file to see whats up.  An exception?  File not found?  What!?  I franticly remote into my machine (thank Heavens for TSWeb!) and dive into VS.NET.

But wait!  It's all still here but I can't debug...  Very odd.  By now I'm freaking out.  This is one of the key aspects of my project and it just broke.  I know I didn't change/break my code. I know ASPNET has write access to the proper temp directories.... I know I didn't change anything!

But wait. I did change something.  My upgrade earlier in the day was so quick & painless that I had almost forgotten it (I am always messing with something crazy on my box). 

By some twist of fate I do a couple googles for ASP.NET + Domain Controller:

Running ASP.NET on a Domain Controller

By default, the worker process for Microsoft® ASP.NET (Aspnet_wp.exe) runs under the local machine account to restrict access to domain resources and provide a more secure environment. This will cause an error if you try to run or debug an ASP.NET application on a domain controller or a backup domain controller. On a domain controller, all user accounts are domain accounts and not local machine accounts, so Aspnet_wp.exe fails because it cannot find a local account named "localmachinename\ASPNET".

Whadaya know. 

Needless to say I got the project working, and think I got a pretty good grade.  More importantly I learned a valuable lesson.  Again.

Documentation is very usefull, but only if it's used.