Currently I am in the middle of developing a few of my own Website projects. While the projects themselves are not important (and will be announced later) I am going to start posting any of my experiences in setting up these sites in the Virtual Dedicated Server which I have now leased.
I took the approach of my own Virtual Dedicated Server to have the most control over how these websites are setup and because it will be a good re-learning experience. I used to be involved with web deployments a lot, but recently my regular work projects have steered me clear of this area, its time to change that.
.NET 3.5 Running in IIS 6.0
One of my first challenges was the need to deploy my first .NET 3.5 framework websites into this freshly installed virtual server. By default, my server had only .NET 1.1 installed and nothing enabled for IIS extensions.
To change this I first downloaded and installed the .NET 3.5 runtime. Then, I proceeded to download and install the .NET 2.0 runtime to have both on the server.
The Puzzle Begins
During the 2.0 install though I got an error that said "Setup cannot continue because this version of the .NET Framework is incompatible with a previously installed one. For more information, see http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q312/5/00.asp"
This puzzled me at first but I did get the general hint, installing the .NET 3.5 runtime somehow already put the .NET 2.0 runtime in place. I didn't think it worked like this from the beginning, but obviously I was mistaken. To look at this situation further I entered the IIS 6.0 Web Service Extension tab and found another strange thing, only ASP.NET 2.0 and 1.1 were registered for Allow/Prohibited status.
My Theory
My theory is that ASP.NET 3.5 must still run on the core 2.0 libraries (or something went really wrong with my 3.5 install). To further test my theory I published and installed my first .NET 3.5 websites into IIS with the settings shown above and it seems to be working.
Its also worth noting that looking under the ASP.NET tab of Website Properties it also does not show .NET 3.5 as an option, instead 2.0 and 1.1 are available just like in the extensions screen.
Solution?
I will continue to investigate this but it seems that once the framework 3.5 is installed simply allowed .NET 2.0 to run will do the trick for 3.5 websites
If anyone has any further information on this I would appreciate a reply to this post or an email.
