Build a webservice with Visual Basic.Net in Visual Studio 2003

When you want to build a webservice with Visual Basic.Net in Visual Studio 2003, you need to have internet information services or IIS installed on your computer.

In case Visual Studio was installed first and IIS is installed afterwards, it's very likely Visual Basic.Net will give an error message whenever creating a new VB.Net webservice.

It's because in the above scenario ASP.Net is not correctly registered with IIS. It's better to install IIS first and the .Net platform (Visual Studio) afterwards, because in that case you can create a new webservice in Visual Basic.Net without any trouble.

However, there's a solution for this problem, as I've found out today. With the .Net platform an utility is installed that will take care of the registration of ASP.Net in IIS. This utility is aspnet_regiis.exe. It's installed in a directory under the windows\microsoft.net\framework\... directory.

Just search for this utility and then write down the path where it's located (or copy and paste the path with the help of the Windows Explorer). Then execute the utility by clicking on the Windows 'Start' button and click on 'Run'. Type in or paste the path (that has a trailing backslash) in the dialog and directly behind the path (without any spaces after the path) type the following:

aspnet_regiis.exe -i

In case the path to this utility was not typed ahead of the above command, your computer can't locate it and it will not be executed. By the way, you can also use the Visual Studio Command Prompt via the Windows Start menu.

You should see a DOS box for a while during the execution of the utility. Do not close this box manually, just wait for it to close by itself.

This should solve the problem and you can make your first VB.net webservice.