Using IIS7 on Vista with VS 2005

A few people have pinged me over the last week asking about how to use VS 2005 with an IIS 7.0 web-site on Windows Vista.  Specifically, they've run into an issue where they see a dialog message asking them to install the FrontPage Server Extensions, or they get a "You must be a member of the administrators group" message when they try to connect (see dialog below):



Bradley has published a nice blog post that describes detailed steps on how to enable VS 2005 to connect to IIS 7.0.  To quickly summarize you need to follow the below two steps to enable it:
1) You need to make sure that you have the the optional "IIS 6 Management Compatibility" option installed within IIS7.  This installs an API for the new configuration system that is compatible with the old Metabase APIs (which is what VS 2005 uses).  You can select this using the "Turn Windows Features on or Off" option in the Vista Control Panel:

2) You need to make sure you launch VS 2005 with "elevated" privledges so that you have admin privledges to connect to IIS (this is needed to debug a service, as well as create sites and/or change bindings that impact the entire machine).  You can do this by right-clicking on the VS icon and select the "Run as Administrator" option when launching VS:

Note that this is needed even if your user is already in the administrators group if you have UAC enabled (which is on by default with Vista).  If you disable UAC (which you can also do via the control panel), then this second step isn't required.  Running VS 2005 with "elevated" privledges won't be required if you use the built-in VS 2005 Web-Server (since it has reduced privledges already).  It is only required when connecting and running/debugging with IIS locally.
We'll be updating Visual Studio 2005 to have more accurate error messages to help guide you to the above steps more naturally in the future.  Until then, just use the above steps and you are good to go.
Hope this helps,
Scott