IIS 7 and Classic ASP

Since Classic ASP is over a decade old, Microsoft seems to want to forget it ever existed by making it difficult to deploy classic asp apps. I was reminded of this again in a recent project where I am converting an existing classic asp application to a .net app.

I first wanted to set up the classic asp application on my own (windows 7 64bit) machine so I could dissect it and use some of the existing logic. After adding a new application in IIS and trying to browse to the default page, I was getting a 404 error. After googling a bit, I discovered that there must be some special configuration for classic asp apps... and then I found a link that explained that Classic ASP Not Installed by Default on IIS 7.0. That was nice of them - first issue solved.

Second issue: I was then getting this vague error:
An error occurred on the server when processing the URL. Please contact the system administrator.

Thanks! I am the administrator :(

After some digging, I found out that error messages are not sent to the browser by default for asp pages in IIS7 in case sensitive information is displayed. I followed the instructions and now I can see the errors.

Now I can get to work on the conversion.