Question

I am looking for a nice easy step by step ‘How To’ guide for getting a classic asp application working under IIS 7.0.

It is on a 64 bit windows server 2008 machine if that makes any difference.

Answer 1

We’ve been moving some Classic ASP code to 64 bit Windows 2008. Here are some things we did or discovered along the way:

• Start off by hosting the application in a ‘Classic’ pipeline mode application pool. Once things are running just fine you can switch to ‘Integrated Mode’ should you need to leverage the features it offers at a later date.

• If your ASP application consumes any 32 bit third party or in-house components you will need to configure the application pool to run in 32 bit mode. 32 bit DLL’s won’t load into a 64 bit process. You can configure this in the Advanced Settings of an application pool. Set Enable 32-Bit Applications to True.

• To force detailed error reporting by Classic ASP, open the ASP ‘feature’ page for the website then expand the Debugging Properties node. Set Send Errors To Browser to True.

• If your application uses parent paths you’ll need to configure this in the ASP settings ‘feature’ page (same one as above). The setting is under the Behaviour node and is named Enable Parent Paths. The default setting is False just as with IIS6.

• The default anonymous account in IIS7 is called IUSR. You can change this by opening the Authentication settings ‘feature’ page for the website and editing the Anonymous Authentication setting.

• Prefer to use Application Pool Identities for both the Application Pool and site Anonymous account: Application Pool Identities