For a long time, I had been debugging websites in IIS on Windows XP. If it was an original XP installation, setting up IIS was usually straightforward. At most, I only had to pay attention to the disk format—FAT32 or NTFS—and then adjust the permissions accordingly.
Later I bought a notebook that came with Vista Home Basic. When I tried to set up IIS on it, I ran into a number of problems and never really got them solved. In the end I gave up. My guess was that it had something to do with the edition of the system, since getting IIS working properly on a Home version was already a bit troublesome to begin with.
A classmate of mine installed Windows 7 RC build 7100. At first he used the English version, which made him the first person in our class to try it. Later he added a Traditional Chinese language pack. The wording looked a little different from what we were used to in everyday speech, and some of it felt awkward, but it did not matter much—at least everything was still understandable.
Compared with XP, IIS on Windows 7 comes with more installation options. At first, I did not select anything special during installation. The process itself was simple, and unlike XP, it did not ask for an installation disc. After it finished, I opened Control Panel, found Administrative Tools, opened IIS Manager, and created a new website.
Then I installed PJBlog, but it would not open and showed an error. After searching on Google, I noticed that other people had an ASP file icon in their IIS features, while my installation did not. So I went back to the Windows features installation screen and expanded the available options.
Under World Wide Web Services → Application Development Features, there were quite a few items, including:
- .NET Extensibility
- ASP
- ASP.NET
- CGI
- ISAPI Extensions
- ISAPI Filters
- Server Side Includes
Since I needed to debug an ASP site, I selected ASP and installed the feature again. After that, the familiar PJBlog interface finally opened, and everything seemed to be working normally.
One thing I noticed, though, is that Windows 7 does not seem to allow multiple sites to run the same way XP did. When I created another website and tried to start it, IIS reported: “Cannot start this website. Another website may be using the same port.” So the issue was the port. On XP, multiple local sites could share the same port more easily.
There should be a way to solve this, otherwise it becomes inconvenient when maintaining several local test sites. Having to stop one site and start another every time I want to debug something is not exactly ideal.
At the moment, there still are not many tutorials about IIS on Windows 7. More will probably appear over time. At least I have now managed to set up IIS successfully on Windows 7 and get an ASP site running.