Rampidbyter Rampid byter: A byte of my .Net developing life.

Ok, I admit it. I am one of those people who likes new technologies. I also am ‘that guy’ who installs a beta framework on a production web server just so I can host a new website using the bleeding edge technology/framework. They don’t call it bleeding edge for nothing because sometimes it can just plain hurt after you install said new technology and the new technology takes down the existing system.

That is exactly what happened when I installed .Net 4 on my web server. The next thing i know after the installation and planned restart all of my websites were redirecting to the 404 website not found page. Fantastic, it’s 1am, I've just installed a beta framework, and all of my websites are effectively offline. Well that’s what i get, but at least it’s my personal server instead of a corporate server I work on. I know better than that by now, and if didn’t I wouldn’t have a job. Not saying I’ve not been guilty of taking down a web server before.

Anyway, the first thing that happened as I said was the 404 pages. From the ten website impacted only one gave the yellow-screen of death. Thankfully I was able to just simply set the custom error configuration to off so I could read the error. Sure enough it’s an error related to running a website in an application pool using a framework not supported by the configuration settings. After checking the application pools every single last one of them were set to .Net 4.0 integrated instead of the respective .Net 2.0 integrated/classic set on the individual sites. A few drop-down lists later my websites were all back up and functioning, but I was left with the “what else is impacted” feeling after the installation. You’d think after four framework releases the installer and framework configuration installation would have been set better than to default all my application pools to use .Net 4.0. It’s not like it’s the only option available.

Again to recap the .Net 4.0 Beta installer will change your IIS 7 (i assume IIS 5/6) website applications pools to use .Net 4.0 instead of your predefined settings. Just change them back and everything starts functioning again. Hopefully this will be the last “oh what have I done!” I run into after installing the beta framework. Fingers crossed!