I first encountered this problem while trying to deploy my client’s website from Visual Studio 2005 to my Windows XP’s Internet Information Services 5.1 (a.k.a IIS 5.1) in my Windows XP SP3 powered notebook. It wasn’t a difficult one as a search on google give me tons of solutions. Trying not to make this just another solution for this problem I try to explain how to spot the problem and then provide the solution in the most detailed way.
Figure 1: The error message you will get and the clue to the solution.
Figure 1 is a typical error page thrown by IIS for not being able to parse the configuration section ‘connectionStrings’. ‘connectionStrings’ configuration section is only available on ASP.NET 2.0 and above so the first thing to look at for clue to the solution is the ASP.NET version. As you can see (indicated in Figure 1), The ASP.NET version is 1.1 which is not what we wanted. The solution is to run the website in ASP.NET 2.0 and here’s how.
Step 1: Select “Start” icon
Step 2: Select “Control Panel” icon
Step 3: Select “Administrative Tools” icon
Step 4: Select “Internet Information Services” icon
Step 5: Right-click on the website which the problem occurs
Step 6: Select “Properties”
Step 7: Select “ASP.NET” tab
Step 8: Select “2.0.x” from “ASP.NET version:” dropdown list
Tags: 2.0, 2005, ASP.NET, configuration, connectionStrings, iis, information, internet, services, SP3, Studio, Visual, web.config, Windows, XP
