IIS 6.0 does not serve aspx pages out of the box

I have used ASP.NET for quite some time. I have probably always been lucky that the infrastructure or deployment person always enabled aspx on IIS for me. I use a Windows XP with IIS 5 sometimes or Vista with IIS 7. They do serve aspx pages by default, on XP once the .NET framework is downloaded and installed, there is nothing else to tweak.

On Friday afternoon, I had to deploy to an IIS 6 box on windows 2003, to my surprise, it didn’t serve any of the aspx pages. Even a small Hello World project on an simple label. I missed the happy hour with my colleagues and went home completely puzzle. Why? ASP.NET was already available when Windows 2003 saw the light. To my surprise there was nothing on the event log.

The answer came a few hours later and after few Google queries:

IIS 6.0: ASP.NET Is Not Automatically Installed on Windows Server 2003

1. Open IIS Manager, expand the master server node (that is, the Servername node), and then select the Web service extensions node.
2. In the right pane of IIS Manager, right-click the extension that you want to enable. In this example, this is Active Server Pages.
3. Click to select the Allow check box.
Add a New Web Service Extension to IIS 6.0

To permit IIS to serve content that requires a specific ISAPI or CGI extension that is not already listed in the Web service extensions list, follow these steps:
1.Open IIS Manager, expand the master server node, and then select the Web service extensions node.
2.In the right pane of the IIS Manager, click Add a new Web service extension under Tasks.
3.In the Extension name box, type a friendly name for the extension that you want to add (for example, FrontPage Server Extensions).
4.In the Required files box, click Add, and then select the path and the name of the file that will handle requests for the specific extension. After you select the path and the file name, click OK.
5. If the extension must be enabled immediately, click to select the Set extension status to allowed check box.
6. Click OK to save your changes.

Hopefully Mono will run seamless  on Apache one of these days…