Lost Afternoon

Posted on July 1, 2008 One Comment

Final piece to the puzzle Lost most of the afternoon today wrestling with the deployment of one of our web applications. Some new “client-specific” code had been developed in our dev environment and it was now time to move it out to QA (quality assurance) and then, hopefully, production.

The dev environment web server is still running Windows 2000 Server. Yeah I know, I know… I haven’t had a chance to upgrade it yet! In fact, I actually have had the replacement (running Windows 2003 Web) ready to go for several months – just no time to switch.

The QA web server runs Windows 2003. The new code I was moving is a .NET assembly that is called by some Classic ASP pages.

Don’t Panic: This is not yet another “how to interface classic ASP and .NET” posts — I promise.

I grabbed the .NET assembly DLL file from the dev server and dropped it into c:\windows\system32 directory as normal. Slight wrinkle though: This one is, for whatever reason, not strongly named so doesn’t go into the GAC.

I ran regasm against it and then had it tested. No luck and we got an error indicating that the object wasn’t found. And from there we spun into a cycle of trying various regasm flags and restarting the IIS web server (ala iisreset /restart) for the next few hours. Dismal and frustrating trial and error.

Well, the key difference between the two servers is that one is Windows 2000 / IIS 5 and the other is Windows 2003 / IIS 6. A bit of research finally taught us that IIS 6 doesn’t look in all the directories for assemblies as one might have become accustomed to in IIS 5.

I unreg’d the assembly and moved it to c:\windows\system32\inetserv and now it works just fine. Just that simple. system32 isn’t part of the “CLR class search” path.

I can just about bet that six months from now I’ll be searching the web for the same issue. Next time, with luck, I’ll find this article and save a few hours.

[picture is Piece by Ice Sabre]

Tags: .NET, ASP, GAC, IIS, server, windows-2000, windows-2003