I know that most of you reading the blogs on this site have already seen how handy the errors are in IIS 7.0 as compared to previous error conditions. This weekend, I was playing with BlogEngine.NET and thought I’d put it on my personal site (tobint.com) to try it out. I downloaded the software and tried setting it up on my server. After following the brief instructions, I hit an error:

In previous versions of IIS, this might have been all that I had to go on. I’d then search one or several search engines for that exact error and read through blog posts, forums, knowledge base articles and FAQ’s before I found what I needed. In IIS 7.0, I found the friendly error page awaiting me:

 I looked at the “Things you can try” and a picked the first “fix” on the list. Since my application was not in the Default Web Site, I ran the appcmd for my application in “tobint.com/”. 

 As you can see, the error page correctly identified that my configuration needed to be migrated, and gave me the steps I needed to migrate it effectively. No searching the web. No trying to trace the problem down. No turning on tracing for ASP.NET pages. 

I love this feature. It’s a huge time saver and I don’t think it gets bragged on enough.

Related posts:

1. Why Google dominates their market
2. Extending IIS 7 APIs through PowerShell (Part II)
3. Googling for web.config and other source code