Can I stop an IIS?

Question

In a .NET windows application to to modify a remote machine config file that is used by an ASP.NET application. However, I keep getting the error:

System.IO.IOException: The process cannot access the file '[file name]' because it is being used by another process.

Now, this may not be the problem, but I'm figuring that if I can stop the IIS, then I can modify the machine config file (without getting the exception), and then I can restart the IIS using this code:

 Process proc = new Process();
            proc.EnableRaisingEvents = false;
            proc.StartInfo.WindowStyle = ProcessWindowStyle.Hidden;
            proc.StartInfo.FileName = "iisreset";
            proc.StartInfo.Arguments = serverName;
            try
            {
                proc.Start();
                proc.WaitForExit();
                ...

1) Is there a way to stop the IIS without restarting it, and 2) Doe this approach to changing the server.config file even make sense?

(note, I am modifying the file with regular expressions search and replace; is this a problem?)

Answer 1

You should be able to do something like this. I don't have windows, so I can't check the exact name of the service, but I think it is "IISADMIN" or "w3svc". Remember this should be the service name and not the display name you see in the service control panel.

ServiceController controller  = new ServiceController();
controller.MachineName = "."; // or the remote machine name
controller.ServiceName = "IISADMIN"; // or "w3svc"
string status  = controller.Status.ToString();

// Stop the service
controller.Stop();

// Start the service
controller.Start();

You can also use

net stop w3svc

or

net stop IISADMIN

from the commandline or in your process in your code