WARNING: Major Geek Content …
Last week my colleague deployed an update to one of our many web sites. This particular site was originally coded in Microsoft’s .NET Framework 2.0 using Visual Studio 2005. She updated it in Visual Studio 2008, successfully using the automatic update tool VS offers to run when you open up a project created in an earlier version of whatever VS you open it in. There were no issues when we ran through the site on our test web server.
All was looking good until we moved the web site code to our production web server. All the apps on the web site were working properly except for one file upload application. For whatever reason, this one hunk of code decided to malfunction. We’d run into problems similar to this one which turned out to be caused by a missing patch – so that was the first place I looked.
Sure enough, for some reason our WSUS server didn’t push out all of the service packs for the various versions of the .NET Framework to this server. To fix this, I ran Windows Update on the server. As it started the service pack install I got an error: 0×643. Bummer!
A quick search found the solution on Microsoft’s support site in Article ID 923100. The short version: manually uninstall all versions of the .NET Framework, reinstall them and then run the service pack install. Easy enough, I supposed.
I spent 2 1/2 hours of my Saturday uninstalling and reinstalling. When I was all done I opened up the web site only to find it was erroring out with the “Yellow Window” generic error message. Time to stop, think, and not over-react.
Thankfully, we have a VPN and Remote Desktop so I could multitask from home that day. After taking time to swap laundry loads from the washer to the dryer it hit me to check the web site settings in IIS. Good thing I did because there was the problem, bigger than Stuttgart (as we used to say when I was in the Army) – the ASP.NET version selected in the ASP.NET tab in the web site properties was 1.1xxxxx instead of 2.0.50727. A quick change and a restart of the IIS Admin Service got everything working as it should.
I can only guess that the IIS settings were automatically changed when the .NET Framework 2.0 was uninstalled from the server. It makes sense – and it makes sense that one would need to go reselect the proper version of the Framework. Since that wasn’t spelled out in the Microsoft article, I’m warning you here.
Hopefully you won’t have to go through this yourself. If you do, though, don’t forget to check the IIS settings before declaring yourself finished.
