Hosting .NET Core Apps in IIS


While .NET Core is intended to be run as a standalone application, I enjoy the convenience of running it through IIS on client systems.  This is especially nice since the applications I develop are microservices meant to augment the functionality of the Dynamics Business Central ERP system.  Often I will piggyback these on the already open port for the web client thus bypassing the need to involve IT in the process.

All of the documentation I've seen shows this being a much more complicated process than I have found it to be.  For my own memory and for the edification of the rest of the world (if anyone else reads this), here are the steps I have found to be needed to deploy a .NET Core application on IIS as of 2.2.

  • Download the latest .NET Core Hosting Bundle and install it.
  • Restart IIS using IISRESET from an elevated command prompt (or just restart the server if you feel like it).
  • Take the published version of your application produced by Visual Studio and copy it onto the production server.  
  • Change any application configuration settings.
  • In IIS Manager
    • Create an application pool.  I prefer not to start it right away.
    • Set the .NET CLR version to No Managed Code
    • If you are using a SQL backend and don't want to setup delegation, change your Identity to a user with database access or use SQL Server Authentication.  You will know this is a problem if you are using Integrated Authentication and start receiving error messages about MACHINENAME$ not being able to authenticate.
    • Convert your site to an application.  Attach it to the application pool you just setup.
    • Change your authentication model if so desired.
    • Start the application pool if it hasn't already been started.
That should be it.  You can now access you're .NET Core application.

The full document from Microsoft can be found here.

2/5/20 Update: THE 0x8007000d ERROR

Typically, the cause of this error is a missing or invalid web.config file.  The web.config file is not needed for running under .NET directly but is needed for IIS.  It should look something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration>
  <location path="." inheritInChildApplications="false">
    <system.webServer>
      <handlers>
        <add name="aspNetCore" path="*" verb="*" modules="AspNetCoreModule" resourceType="Unspecified" />
      </handlers>
      <aspNetCore processPath="dotnet" arguments=".\MyApp.dll" stdoutLogEnabled="false" stdoutLogFile=".\logs\stdout" />
    </system.webServer>
  </location>
</configuration>
<!--ProjectGuid: 8129071a-834f-45cd-afd7-ffb49277fc06-->

 If everything looks right with that, check your applicationHost.config file under %windir%\System32\inetsrv\config.  Make sure there is a section for aspNetCore under system.webServer sectionGroup.

        <sectionGroup name="system.webServer">
            <---- Other things ---->
            <section name="webSocket" overrideModeDefault="Deny" />
            <section name="aspNetCore" overrideModeDefault="Allow" />
        </sectionGroup>

That's all for now.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Accessing Dynamics NAV OData with Postman

Image
1/13/20 - This apparently only applies to NAV.  See note at the end for connecting to Business Central It took me a little while to nail down authenticating to a Dynamics NAV OData web service with Postman.  Fiddler does it quite easily but I suspect it is a little more intelligent while Postman requires the correct settings for everything. First, in NAV you need to have NTLM authentication enabled.  I have found this is required any time you want to use the web services with anything other than .NET (and even then...). Now, with NTLM enabled, you might think the authentication is NTLM but you'd be wrong.  It's Digest.  There are two flavors of Digest: MD5 and MD5-sess.  By default, Postman will come up with MD5.  I discovered it was supposed to be MD5-sess by using Chrome's developer console.  With this console open, make the GET request and you can see all of the data being exchanged. Within the Authorization header, toward the end, you will see an algorithm setting
Read more

When you are falsely accused of not having SQL Server Report Builder installed

Today I was updating some report objects from a text file for an older BC13 upgrade.  Yes, even at this late date BC13 can be an "upgrade".  Long story.  Anyhow, in the process of pulling in reports I got an error message To upgrade reports, you must have Microsoft SQL Server 2016 Report Builder installed. The problem is, I did have SQL Server 2016 Report Builder installed.  Some cursory Googling revealed that someone else had run across this and their solution was to install an older version of the report builder.  Not satisfied with this option, I ran the import under Process Monitor .  Process Monitor showed that BC was looking for Microsoft.ReportingServices.RdlObjectModel.dll and not finding it.  Sure enough, that file was nowhere to be found.  I did find an article on that indicating that it was a part of older report builder installations and I managed to find it on my development system under some Docker containers (of all places).  I copied it to the RoleTailored Cl
Read more

Error with Zetadocs on Sharepoint Online

Image
I was recently setting up Zetadocs on a new server (existing database) and I got this message when closing the General Settings screen. Exception of type 'Microsoft.Dynamics.Nav.Types.Exceptions.Encryption.NavEncryptionKeyNotFoundException' was thrown. I couldn't find the error anywhere in Google, hence this post.  The problem is that on a new server, the key needed to decrypt Sharepoint Online's login information will not have been installed.  To fix this, first connect to the service where Zetadocs was first installed (or is working) and open the Enrcryption Management screen. Click the "Export Encryption Key" button and save the key to a file.  You will be prompted to secure the file with a password. Once you have the file saved, copy it to the new server then go into the Encryption Management screen on its service and click "Import Encryption Key".  Enter the password for your file and the new key will be imported.
Read more