Why is IIS 6.0 metabase compatibility required to be installed on IIS 7.0?

Question

I recently encountered some harrowing time with our application's installer not able to run due to the non-availability of IIS 6.0 metabase compatibility on my Win2008 machine.

I am curious to know why is this required. Can anybody provide some insights?

Answer 1

IIS 6 has several interfaces for management via scripts and other programming languages. Many products rely on such interfaces.

IIS 7 no longer supports them by default, unless you install the metabase compatibility role service. In this way it promotes the latest interfaces.

However, for most existing products (even including many Microsoft products) that rely on IIS, they need metabase compatibility.