While publishing Web API using Visual Studio, you may run into some errors. This article helps to provide the solution to the possible errors that will occur. When you publish the Web API from Visual Studio, the following error may possibly come up.

Output class library not set error while hosting web API
OutputPath property is not set for project 'Company.Directory.Web.csproj'. Please check to make sure that you have specified a valid combination of Configuration and Platform for this project. Configuration=Release Platform='AnyCPU'. You may be seeing this message because you are trying to build a project without a solution file, and have specified a non-default Configuration or Platform that doesn't exist for this project.

Solution

When you try to publish for the first time, one of the reasons for the above error to pop up is due to the incorrect settings in .csproj.user file of the solution.

Open the .csproj.user file in the solution and change the settings in the file.

Add the following code in the file.
    <PropertyGroup Condition=" '$(Configuration)|$(Platform)' == 'Debug|AnyCPU' "> 
        <DebugSymbols>true</DebugSymbols> 
        <DebugType>full</DebugType> 
        <Optimize>false</Optimize> 
        <OutputPath>bin\</OutputPath> 
        <DefineConstants>DEBUG;TRACE</DefineConstants> 
        <ErrorReport>prompt</ErrorReport> 
        <WarningLevel>4</WarningLevel> 
    </PropertyGroup> 
    <PropertyGroup Condition=" '$(Configuration)|$(Platform)' == 'Release|AnyCPU' "> 
        <DebugType>pdbonly</DebugType> 
        <Optimize>true</Optimize> 
        <OutputPath>bin\</OutputPath> 
        <DefineConstants>TRACE</DefineConstants> 
        <ErrorReport>prompt</ErrorReport> 
        <WarningLevel>4</WarningLevel> 
    </PropertyGroup> 
    <PropertyGroup Condition="'$(Configuration)|$(Platform)' == 'Dev|AnyCPU'"> 
        <DebugSymbols>true</DebugSymbols> 
        <OutputPath>bin\</OutputPath> 
        <DefineConstants>DEBUG;TRACE</DefineConstants> 
        <DebugType>full</DebugType> 
        <PlatformTarget>AnyCPU</PlatformTarget> 
        <ErrorReport>prompt</ErrorReport> 
        <CodeAnalysisIgnoreBuiltInRuleSets>false</CodeAnalysisIgnoreBuiltInRuleSets> 
        <CodeAnalysisIgnoreBuiltInRules>false</CodeAnalysisIgnoreBuiltInRules> 
        <DeployIisAppPath>Port 80/directory/dev</DeployIisAppPath> 
    </PropertyGroup> 

Solution to 500.19 internal server error while hosting Web API

Solution

The above error will pop up when you do not have the permission to access the folder/web.config file.

•     In Windows Explorer, locate the web.config file that is associated with the Web site.
•     Right-click the web.config file
•     Click Properties.
•     Click the Security tab, and then click Edit.
•     Click Add.
•     In the Enter the object names to select box, IUSR, click Check Names, and then click OK.
•     Click to select the Read check box, and then click OK.
•     In the Web.config Properties dialog box, click OK.

Solution to 500.21 internal server error while hosting Web API

Solution

One of the reasons for the error 500.21 Internal Server Error to pop up, is when ASP.NET is not installed completely in your system.
    Run the command prompt as administrator.
    Type the line in the command prompt below any one.

    %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\aspnet_regiis.exe -i
    or
    %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\aspnet_regiis.exe -I

Solution to login for application pool access error is denied while hosting Web API

Solution

Create the application pool in IIS by selecting the .NET version which your project supports. When creating the site in the default application in IIS for Web API, select the application pool which you have created. The above error will pop up if the application pool which you have created has a built in account selected.

For reference - go to: "Advanced Setting->Process->Identity” of the application pool which you have created. Change the application pool identity to custom account and click on set button to provide the account credentials. Once you have set the setting, refresh/reset IIS to resolve the above error.

Access Denied Error while hosting Web API

Solution
The above error will pop up if the solution directory (folder) doesn’t have required permissions.
To resolve the issue follow the steps given in “500.19 : internal server error”.

This Script will help in checking the below basic functionalities of the Bulk Servers. It will do so during Migration, Patch and Monthly Restart activities
This Script is added with the below functionalities,

• IP Capture -- >Collects the DNSHostName,Description,DHCPEnabled,IPAddress,IpSubnet,DefaultIPGateway,MACAddress,DNSServerSearchOrder for all Enabled and IP Discovered NICs
• Services Status -- >It checks all the Services Automatic set and not Stopped services and provides the output.
• Server Status –- >Checks the Servers reachability and provides the output on screen
• Server Shutdown/Reboot -- >Checks the server status and perform Bulk Shutdown / Restart at once with Event Description Keyed.

  

Output Samples

European IIS 10 Hosting

We may get the following error after publishing a website on IIS.

Parser Error Message
"Unrecognized attribute 'targetFramework'. Note that attribute names are case-sensitive."

To fix it, we need to follow the below troubleshooting steps.

1. Check on which .NET version the application is developed. Let's assume, it's .NET 4.0.
   
2. Open IIS Manager and find the Application Pool, on which your website is hosted.
   
3. Go to that Application Pool and check the .NET version and change it to 4.0 accordingly by clicking on Basic\Advanced Settings.
   If .NET 4.0 is not listed, go ahead and install it.
   
4. If it still won't show up, go to command prompt and fire the below command to find a list of ASP.NET versions installed:
   C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319>aspnet_regiis.exe -lv
   In the output, if .NET 4.0 is not listed, register it by firing the below command:
   C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319>aspnet_regiis.exe -I.
   
5. It should show up as .NET 4.0 in the .NET Framework Version dropdown for the application pool.

   

Here, we are going to connect with the Docker engine remotely using PowerShell. For this, we can either use our local machine or a VM. Before we proceed further, make sure that your Nano Server is up and running.

Step 1 Downloading the Docker Daemon and extracting them
Create a variable that references the zip file which is in the official docker website. This zip file will have the Docker engine data that is required to create the client and server. Open the PowerShell with administrator privileges and run the below given command.

This will assign the link to that variable named,

$package = "https://download.docker.com/components/engine/windows-server/cs-1.12/docker.zip"

The next step is to invoke a web request to get the link that has been referenced in the variable called. Then, the file will be stored in a temporary storage by getting downloaded from the Docker site. For this, we have to run the following command.
Invoke-WebRequest $package ` -OutFile "$env:TEMP\docker.zip" ` -UseBasicParsing

Now, we shall expand the downloaded zip file to the programming files of our machine. For this, run -
Expand-Archive -Path "$env:TEMP\docker.zip" `
-DestinationPath $env:ProgramFiles

The final step is to create an environment variable that will add the Docker directory to the path daemon. Run the command
[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("Path", $env:Path + ";$($env:ProgramFiles)\Docker", [EnvironmentVariableTarget]::Machine)

Nano Server
Now, we have finished installing the Docker (client) and Dcokerd (engine) in "Program Files" folder. Check for these inside the Docker folder.

Step 2 Creating Environment variable to connect Docker easily
Here, Docker is client and Dockerd is engine. Now, we are going to configure an environment variable that will store the DNS name of our Nano Server and connect with it. For this, run the below command.
[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("DOCKER_HOST","nanoserver007.southindia.cloudapp.azure.com",[EnvironmentVariableTarget]::Machine)

Note - Replace the DNS name with your Nano Server DNS or IP.

Now, open the new PowerShell console and run the command "docker version" . This will show you the client (Docker) and engine (Dockerd). This means we have created a connection in between these two services which we have actually downloaded from the Docker website.

In this article, we will learn the most useful and powerful command line tool, AppCmd, for publishing or hosting a website on IIS. Using the AppCmd tool, we can host static as well as a dynamic website (ASP.NET Webform, MVC, Dot Net Core etc) easily.

Description
I assume you are aware of (or have knowledge of) how to Host or Publish Website in IIS using inetmgr. This will help you understand AppCmd.exe.
AppCmd.exe is the command line tool for managing IIS 7 and above. It provides an easy way to manage a website without Graphical User Interface.

Some of the things you can do with AppCmd,

• Create and configure sites, apps, application pools, and virtual directories
• Start and stop sites, and recycle application pools
• Search, manipulate, export, and import IIS and ASP.NET configuration

How to Use AppCmd.exe
The AppCmd.exe command line is built on top of a set of top-level server management objects, such as Site and Application. These objects expose methods that can be used to perform various actions on those objects, and object instances expose properties that can be inspected and manipulated.

AppCmd.exe is located in the %systemroot%\system32\inetsrv\ directory. Because it is not a path of the PATH automatically, you need to use the full path to the executable when executing commands like in %systemroot%\system32\inetsrv\AppCmd.exe list sites. Alternatively, you can manually add the inetsrv directory to the path on your machine so that you can access AppCmd.exe directly from any location.

Note
Run Command Prompt as Administrator to using AppCmd.
In this article, we learn basic command to host websites.

List all available commands and actions in AppCmd
AppCmd
AppCmd /?

From the above screenshot, it is clear that Command Prompt is run as administrator and run AppCmd which return list of supported Command.
List all hosted or published websites in IIS.
    AppCmd List Site

In the above screenshot, I have run List Site command which returns all published site with bindings and state of site e.g. Started or Stop.

Create the website using AppCMD
    APPCMD add site /name:WebByAppCMD /bindings:"http/*:94:" /physicalPath:"C:\Users\Mepani\Desktop\2018 Article\Kendo Grid" -virtualDirectoryDefaults.userName:USERNAME -virtualDirectoryDefaults.password:PASSWORD

For any website hosting we require information as above like Site Name, Bindings (Protocal, hostname), Physical Path, Credential for access or permission to folder path.
Sometimes, if you don't provide access/permission to a physical path then you might be getting Access denied error.
View Newly Hosted or published website
    appcmd.exe list site "WEbByAppCMD"

Start and stop hosted or publish a website
    appcmd.exe start site "WEbByAppCMD"
    appcmd.exe stop site "WEbByAppCMD"

Delete or remove published or hosted website from IIS
    appcmd.exe delete site "WEbByAppCMD"

App CMD Create website
In the above screenshot, we have covered all the above site commands except delete. Possible issue or challenges might be faced during command line website hosting niclude,

• Site name already created
• Port is already in use
• Bad Request -Invalid hostname

Hope you enjoyed this and learned a new way to host or publish a website using AppCmd.

One of our clients receive this error message when deploying his ASP.NET application.

“System.Net.WebException: The underlying connection was closed: Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel.”. Here is how we solved that issue.

There are 3 related and important issues:

1. the remote site uses a Server Name Indication (SNI) certificate, installed on a different domain name
2. the web application was published to a IIS 6.0 (Windows Server 2003) web server
3. a System.Security.Authentication.AuthenticationException: The remote certificate is invalid according to the validation procedure. This error message is caused because the process is not able to validate the certificate supplied by the server during an HTTPS (SSL) request

IIS 6.0 + Server Name Indication (SNI) certificates = System.Net.WebException #

A Server Name Indication (SNI) certificate basically means that you can install oneSSL/TLS certificate on a web server, to use on multiple domain names. The TLS part takes the negotiation, and that enables the server to select the correct virtual domain early and present the browser with the certificate containing the correct name. Therefore with clients and servers that support SNI, a single IP address can be used to serve a group of domain names for which it is impractical to get a common certificate.

Windows Server 2003 (IIS 6.0), Windows Server 2008 (IIS 7.0) and Windows Server 2008 R2 (IIS 7.5) do not support SNI-certificates.

How to Solve this Error Message

You might wonder what the solution to this error message was. Well, simple: Move the website to an IIS 8.0+ (Windows Server 2012) web server. This version supports Server Name Indication certificates. Microsoft calls this SSL Scalability in IIS 8.0. Because of SNI, or SSL-scalability, support in Windows Server 2012, the ASP.NET System.Net.WebException went away.

It’s simple, right? :)

Most of you must be very familiar with IIS, moreover if you use Windows Server and deploy your ASP.NET application. In this tutorial, we will only give short tips about how to improve your IIS 7.5/8 performance. With good performance, IIS will serve better and faster web pages to your users.

Please Disable ASP Debugging

When you run your server in the production environment, you may not need to run ASP debugging mode. Stopping debugging mode will save you a great amount of processing power. To disable debugging, click on your server name in IIS and then right click on it to enable feature view. One the right pane, click on ‘compilation’ and then click on ‘debugging properties’. Next, set the following values as given below:

Server side debugging: false

Client side debugging: false

Limit ASP Threads per Processor

This limits the number of ASP requests handled by IIS simultaneously. Normally, the default value is 25. The maximum allowed number is 100. You can increase it to 50 and monitor the performance level of your IIS. To change this value click on your server and then double click on ASP under IIS in the feature view mode. Next, click on “limit properties” and set the value, as you consider suitable to match your processing needs.

Enable HTTP Compression

This is something that our clients ask to configure and it is really effective to make your site run faster. This feature helps to transfer data faster between IIS and client browsers and saves your bandwidth. You can compress HTTP in both website level and server level. To enable server level http compression, right click on sever name in IIS and then double click on compression under IIS on the right pane. You can enable both static and dynamic http compression.

Setup Logging Option

With default settings, IIS logs almost everything under the hood.  You either can disable logging option or can select a number of essential events to log in your server. To set logging option, click on “Sites” in IIS server, and then select the parameters that you want to keep as a log in your server. Remember to enable the “feature view” by right clicking on the server name in IIS. In the feature view pane, click on ‘log’ and set the logging feature; to disable logging completely click on the disable option on the right pane. Remember that you can set logging option both in server level and website level.

Setup HTTP Response Header

This feature helps to minimize the number of http requests send to IIS by website visitors. HTTP expires header will help the client browser to cache webpages and its elements such as images, CSS etc.  To set http expires you need to click on HTTP response headers in the IIS, and then click on “set common headers”. Next select ‘expire web contents” and select the number of days or hours—this is total time your contents will be cached in the client’s browser.

Enable Output Caching

When you enable output caching, IIS will keep a copy of requested webpages. If a new user requests the very same webpage located in the cache, IIS will send the copy from its cache without reprocessing the contents. Output caching can significantly improve your server response time for dynamic contents.

Modify ASP queue length property

This value represent how often IIS will send “server too busy” message (HTTP error 503) to the users when ASP is receiving high number of requests. If the queue length time is too high, IIS will send “busy message” to users with longer delay, which make the users feel that the server may be out of service.  Too low queue length will cause the server send “server busy message” quite often, consuming resources of the server. If you are unsure about this setting, you can follow Microsoft’s recommendation for one-to-one ratio, which means if you have four processors in your server with ASP thread processor value set to the default 25, you can set the queue length to 25*4=100.

You can change the queue length by going at “limit properties”—the same way you change the ASP thread processor value.

Control the connection limits

This option can give you to control the connection in three ways: controlling connection timeout, controlling maximum bandwidth per website, controlling concurrent connections.

This connection limit option will allow you to set the maximum bandwidth per second and the maximum concurrent connection per second.  The maximum allowed bandwidth make a site use only a certain amount of bandwidth per second—thus improving the performance of other sites in a shared web-hosting environment.

Controlling the number of concurrent connection is another way to improve IIS performance and to improve the security of IIS as well. This option will allow only the specified number of clients to connect to the website at a given moment. So, if any malicious program tries to send numerous connection requests will be rejected by the IIS, and thus prevent your server becoming overloaded with requests during a DDoS attack.

After changing the performance settings, check the performance level of your server by gradually increasing load to a desired level. You can also consider using Google page speed tool to check whether page-loading time has been improved.

Hope above tutorial bring benefits for you. Thanks for reading.