My Experience Converting IssueVision to .NET Framework 2.0

Today I inherited a computer which I was suppose to get IssueVision up an running on Whidbey the next release of Visual Studio.  Overall the process was very simple except for one problem that took more time than I would like.  I wanted to pass along the problem so maybe you would save yourself some frustration if you ever run into this problem.  After I started writing this, I thought you might be interested to hear about my experience converting an existing .NET Framework 1.1 application to 2.0.  So I combined the two into the following:

The machine I inherited came loaded with .NET Framework 2.0 Beta 2 and a recent internal build of Whidbey.  I started by downloading IssueVision and installing it.  Then loaded it in Whidbey where the conversion automatically began.  The conversion completed and it gave me a nice conversion report where there were errors in converting the web project which contains the web services.  After a bit of mucking around and experiencing the extreme slowness of the current build of Whidbey combined with the puny laptop, I decided to check out the Web project from IIS Manager.  What's this, IIS is not installed.  No wonder it doesn't work.  So I installed IIS and repaired IssueVision.  I verified the web projects were installed and then browsed to one of the web services which gave me the frustrating message of :

"A name was started with an invalid character. Error processing resources 'https:// ..'

Now I have seen messages like this before when converting my own xml with my own xslt and in those cases it is something I have done wrong.  However, with this I wasn't sure what was happening. I immediately jumped to the conclusion that the conversion of the project was at fault so I started looking for invalid characters and comparing the 2.0 version to the 1.1 version of IssueVision. Luckily I decided to post a message so that someone smart could help me out.  Justin Rogers came to the rescue and started talking about aspnet_regiis.exe and a bunch of other stuff which I didn't even read, because I went "duh", I should have checked that.  So into IIS manager I went, right click on Default Web Site, click properties, click Home Directory tab, clicked on configuration and to my surprise all the aspx file extensions were there.  "Dang, I thought for sure they wouldn't be there since I just installed IIS after everything else."  Back to Justin's email, "wait a minute, I'm on the wrong computer"  Double Duh.  So I turned to the correct computer and Yeah! the aspx extensions were missing.  

Ok now I just needed to install ASP.NET.  Open the command window, navigated to C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50117 and  ran aspnet_regiis.exe -i.  Install Successful.

This resulted in the web service working when I browsed to it.  So I opened IssueVision back up and tried to build it again.  There were errors all relating to the web service.  So I removed the web reference and then added it back again.  To my surprise it worked.  I have to say great job to the Whidbey developers, they have made it easy to convert 1.1 applications to 2.0.  Even though I had some difficulty it was basically due to not having IIS installed first. 

So it is looking good that we will be able to convert 1.1 applications to 2.0 easily.  However, just make sure you have IIS installed correctly before doing so.  If you don't, be sure to take a look at aspnet_regiis.exe.

Tom

Comments

• Anonymous
  February 15, 2005
  It will be great if you could load up the 2.0 source someplace. I only have VS2005 beta and dont have VS2003 or .NET1.1 As the install checks for .NET1.1, I'm not able to install it at all :-(