I recently got a new laptop and am running Windows Vista RC1. I had been having a bunch of trouble getting Visual Studio 2005 to behave, particularly when trying to debug web applications. It took me a little while to figure out, and I had to pull together a few different resources from the web in order to get things working. I thought I would document them all together here for others to take advantage of (and so I can find them later if I need them!)
When creating web applications, I wanted to use "Local IIS" instead of "File System". This requires the "IIS 6 Management Compatibility" option installed within IIS7. Also, once this is installed, you still need to run Visual Studio as administrator for this to work. Scott Guthrie has a blog post entitled "Tip/Trick: Using IIS7 on Vista with VS 2005" that includes screen grabs of these two steps.
Once this was working, I was still having trouble debugging web applications. Brian Peek has a post with three simple steps to ensure debugging works correctly:
1) In the "Internet Options" control panel, go to the Security tab. Add "http://localhost" to your list of "Trusted Sites"
2) Again, for "Trusted Sites", clilck the "Custom Level..." button. Change the value of User Authentication to "Automatic login with current username and password".
3) In the new IIS manager, ensure that the web application directory is both:
a) in the "Classic .NET AppPool".
b) has "Windows Authentication" enabled in the Authentication section.
After these steps I now have site development working against a local IIS7 server, and debugging is working just fine. There is one last issue that is apparently a Vista RC1 issue without any workarounds. When building solutions, I quite frequently get the error "Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.". If this happens, the only fix is to restart the IDE. Roll on Vista RTM install!
