“To access local IIS Web sites, you must install the following IIS components:”

I was running a new development environment consisting of a Windows 7 32 bit box with Visual Studio 2008 solution containing a number of class libraries and a website located on my local IIS 7.0 instance. 

On spinning the Visual Studio solution up this morning, the following error message was displayed:

"To access local IIS Web sites, you must install the following IIS components:

In addition, you must run Visual Studio in the context of an administrator account."

Hmmm. there’s something wrong with this picture… mainly the non-existent list of components! Further to this, I was running the application as the Administrator!

I found a number of suggestions regarding the switching of the IIS6 Management and Compatibility items in IIS7.0 then switching it back on again after a reboot.I tried that but the fault still presented itself.

The work around I found was to turn off IIS completely by carrying out the following:

1. Select “Start > Control Panel > Programs and Features > Turn Windows features on or off”
2. Ensure all items under Internet Information Services are deselected.
3. Select OK

You’ll probably be prompted to restart your machine. After rebooting, turn IIS back on by following step 1 above again, then reselect the items under Internet Information Services you previously deselected. You shouldn’t need to restart this time, just fire up Visual Studio and you’ll hopefully be able to load your IIS project again.