After installing Visual Studio Orcas Beta 1 on Windows Vista you might run into the following problem after just creating a ASP.NET webpage (or a ASP.NET Futures or ASP.NET Ajax webpage, doesn't matter). This happend on a fresh Vista installation with just Visual Studio Orcas installed:



Visual Studio Orcas Beta 1 is not able to recognize the compiler settings in the web.config file, but the exact same file runs fine in Windows XP.



There are a couple of guys in the MSDN Forums having the same problem, but not solution there yet:

• http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1683227&SiteID=1
• http://forums.asp.net/p/1114611/1733120.aspx
• http://blogs.msdn.com/vstsqualitytools/archive/2007/04/26/
  known-issues-and-workarounds-for-orcas-beta1-asp-net.aspx
• http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1312399&SiteID=1
• http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1354397&SiteID=1

After reading those you might think that the .NET 3.5 Framework installation might be messed up, but everything else just works fine on Vista and you can create all kinds of projects including silverlight, wpf, forms, etc. with .NET 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5. We tried to uninstall Orcas and .NET 3.5 several times, reinstalling it, etc., but that did not help with the problem.

The relatively easy solution to all this is not to install XP (which probably some people did and I still use XP on my main development PC because of too many issues with drivers, games and applications), but to create a simple ASP.NET (or ASP.NET Ajax or ASP.NET Futures) in Visual Studio 2005 (which you have to install first, if you just have VS Orcas yet) and then to just load it with Visual Studio Orcas!

1. Start VS 2005 and Create a new website project:



2. Open as existing website in VS Orcas Beta 1:



3. You can compile and run the project now (and even add silverlight links and do whatever you want, it will run just fine), but you might get a warning that "System.Web.Extensions, Version=1.0.61025.0" was not found and that the website will use the "2.0.0.0" version instead.
Ignore the warning or just replace all "1.0.61025.0" with "2.0.0.0" texts in the web.config to get rid of it.

Hope this helps :)