Classic ASP on Vista/IIS 7.0

I have a couple of classic ASP ‘applications’ that, through the ministrations of some malevolent spirit, keep landing on my desk(top) needing some new feature or other. I didn’t write them and they should have been binned long ago but, despite my protestations, they keep coming back. My work on them can only be described as ‘Turd Polishing’ which is what I would have called this post had I not been keeping an eye on relevant search engine referrals…

So today I found myself having to get classic ASP going on Vista with IIS 7.0 which, it turns out, is an art unto itself. It isn’t even installed for a kick-off, the remedy for which is to go to Control Panel/Programs and Features and then somewhere in there under the ‘Turn Windows features on or off” you’ll find…

Emboldened by success having installed the blighter I then spent far too long with everything I tried to do resulting in this…

…the shoddiness of which led me up the garden path thinking that the moron that had originally written the aforementioned ‘Turd’ had actually included some, albeit ropey, error handling. Don’t be fooled, turns out this is actually the new default IIS error message for script errors. Having worked that out I tracked the error down to this line:

Server.MapPath(“../db/site.mdb”)

(Yes, it uses Access too… I told you – ‘Turd’)

IIS 7.0 doesn’t allow you to use parent paths and so “..” is unacceptable.

For those of you that still have to do the occasional bit of polishing or those others of you that have a treasured bit of beautifully architected ASP 3.0 that you still care for or, heaven forfend, those who are still developing new stuff with it there is a good post on Bill Staples’s blog that will show you how to sort all of that out and get good old ASP 3.0 running on IIS 7.0 on your Vista machine.