Have you ever tried to create an ASP.Net web application or service with Visual Studio.Net 2003 and gotten the error “Visual Studio .Net has detected that the specified Web server is not running ASP.NET version 1.1.  You will be unable to run ASP.Net Web applications or services.”?  I was attempting just this on my tablet and got this very error message.  Thinking ahead of my gentle readers, I captured the moment using my snipping tool.

While I myself had no idea how to fix this, and I was in a location where I did not have access to the Internet to do a search on Google, I did have a good resource with me – Brendon, my fellow Regular Guy.  He had previously seen this problem and knew what to do.  We dug into the .Net framework directory on disk and ran one of the little utility programs that comes with .Net – aspnet_regiis.exe.  You can find the file in your Windows\Microsoft.Net\Framework directory.  You need to pick the version of the .Net framework you want to install, so if you have 1.0 and 1.1 installed on your machine you’ll have something that looks similar to this screen shot.

Launch the Visual Studio .Net Command Prompt (which builds the framework directories into the path).

Without needing to change directories, you can type in the name of the program and the appropriate switches.  In this case you’ll be typing in “aspnet_regiis -i” to install ASP.NET.

I hope you found this educational.  This post was of dual purpose for me – 1) to ensure I know this forever by forcing myself to write it down and 2) to test the blogging API’s ability to handle images.  I wanted to see if I could upload images without being forced to FTP to the server and code the HTML.

— Matt Ranlett