I am in the process of putting together a new machine with Vista Ultimate on it. (I almost feel like asking you if you are sure you want to read this post).

My first site on IIS7 is an Monorail app so I was curious what I was in for.

Here are some resources that helped me:

• Castle Forum Post
• IIS Forum Post
• ScottGu article (I am using VS 2005 still)

Key points:

1. Be sure you have Windows Authentication enabled for the site in IIS7. Debugging requires this.
2. I couldn't find any 'block isapi mapping filter' to disable that is referenced in the castle post. Turns out I didn't need to. (YMMV)
3. Be careful with the appcmd that is suggested by IIS7 when you first try to run with the deprecated system.web tags for monorail's modules/handlers. AppCmd.exe mungs up your web.config where it shouldn't so a peculiar exception is thrown within the System.Web somewhere and for me it claimed it couldn't find the absolute file path to my source. Others reported an NullReferenceException at the same point in the stack.
4. There is a link to the hotfix in the IIS forum post above that is supposed to fix the appcmd.exe config destruction. Until then I simply reverted my config back to the old and injected the new <system.webServer> stuff written by the tool just before the <configuration/> closing tag. All worked after that.

I was finally able to get Monorail pages served up and I am now allowed to go to bed.

<rant>

As an aside, does anyone else get annoyed by tools that mess with configuration behind the scenes? There hasn't been one of these tools yet that hasn't cost me more time in trying to undo the automated functions so that I could recover my application. I also haven't found these GUIs any simpler to follow than plain old hierarchical data. At least with XML all the data is there looking at you to figure out...no tabs, or expandable lists, etc. Just the goods. I know these tools are great for non-coding admins but perhaps we should be able to disable these kinds of utilities.

</rant>