aspnet_regiis i - Why would I need to use this?

Question

I read over the msdn page on the -i here. I've never even used this tool before. I've always configured my apps in IIS just fine. So why would anyone need to use this for .NET 2.0 or 3.5 web apps?

I'm running IIS 7 on a Win 7 PC, do I even need this?

Answer 1

This is something that you don't normally need to use, is more for troubleshooting than for doing anything standard.

Sometimes there's issues with the .NET framework installation on IIS so ASP.NET applications don't work quite properly. To solve this you need to re-install ASP.NET on IIS, the most common way to do that is, first doing aspnet_regiis -u to uninstall and then aspnet_regiis -i to re-install.

This is something that you normally won't need to use, I have very seldom used it, but the times I have, it saved my life.

It used to be more common on "older" versions of the .NET Framework, like 1.0, 1.1 and maybe 2.0 but after .NET 3.0 the use of these commands is very, very rare.