Question

I have a web role that is configured to be hosted in IIS when deployed locally in Compute Emulator. Now I want to run it under IIS Express in order to profile the web site more easily.

Thus I switched development server in the Cloud Project properties (for precise steps refers to this post) and I started the web role in the Compute Emulator. Instead of my home page, IIS Express displays an HTTP 500 error page. The site run fine under IIS and I don’t know why IIS Express is complaining, since it should behave like IIS.

I’m using .NET 4.0, Visual Studio 2010, Windows Azure SDK 1.8 for the Compute Emulators and 1.7 for the runtime libraries, IIS Express 8, all installed under Windows 7.

Answer 1

I followed these instructions to force IIS Express to display detailed error information. This way I found more easily that my site wasn’t loading because of a problem in Web.config.

More precisely, I had this section to enable the tracing of failed requests:

  <system.webServer>
    <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true" />
    <tracing>
      <traceFailedRequests>
        <add path="*">
          <traceAreas>
      ...

IIS Express was complaining that there was already an element under traceFailedRequests with key *. I modified the section in order to first remove this section and then my home page finally loaded correctly.

  <system.webServer>
    <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true" />
    <tracing>
      <traceFailedRequests>
        <remove path="*" />
        <add path="*">
          <traceAreas>
      ...