Unable to access the IIS metabase

Question

An ASP.NET web project loads with up the solution, but I get this error

The Web Application Project is configured to use IIS. Unable to access the IIS metabase. You do not have sufficient privilege to access IIS web sites on your machine.

How can this be solved?

Answer 1

This may have nothing to do with registering ASP/IIS. The reason is exactly what the error message says: Visual Studio devenv.exe is not running with sufficient privileges to access the IIS process, and it needs to do this if your solution contains a web project whose Web settings say to use IIS rather than the VS dev server.

There are two solutions to your problem:

1. Run VS as an Administrator and reopen the solution/project.

2. Edit the web application's project file with a text editor and change this line from True to False:

    <UseIIS>True</UseIIS>
   

That will stop it using IIS and demanding higher privileges.

The reason VS demands Admin privileges is, I believe, because it will try and create the IIS web site for you on demand if it doesn't exist.