Did you know? - Changing ASP.NET Version restarts IIS

Here's a little something I learned the other day.

If you go to the ASP.NET tab and change the ASP.NET version for an application pool this will not only reset the application pool, but the entire IIS. I was a bit surprised at first, but investigating the matter showed that there was a pretty solid architectural decision behind this.

As most "bugs" this turned out to be quite well documented once you know where to look. It's actually mentioned in the aspnet_regiis documentation.

The reason it is documented under aspnet_regiis is because this is also a rather good alternative if you wish to reconfigure an application pool, but not cause an IIS reset.

You do it by running the following two commands:

aspnet_regiis -s w3svc/<instance>/root -norestart
iisapp /a /r

/ Johan

Comments

• Anonymous
  February 05, 2008
  PingBack from http://msdnrss.thecoderblogs.com/2008/02/05/did-you-know-changing-aspnet-version-restarts-iis/

• Anonymous
  February 15, 2008
  Excellent info.  I did not know that.  Thanks!

• Anonymous
  March 04, 2008
  >investigating the matter showed that there was a pretty solid architectural decision behind this< We stumbled across this about 5 months ago; but I have yet to see a good explanation of why it does this. Based on what you've said I've looked at Microsoft's documentation for aspnet_regiis; but can't see a "solid architectural" reason for it. Do you have a link to what you saw. P.S. in an attempt to add value, here's another link on the subject, from 2006... http://blogs.msdn.com/jorman/archive/2006/04/14/asp-net-tab-forces-restart-of-w3svc.aspx