Unable to start process dotnet.exe

Question

I am attempting to setup a new work space and transfer all of my projects from my old computer to the new one. However, I am getting this error when I try to run IIS Express:

Unable to start process C:\Program Files\dotnet\dotnet.exe. The web server request failed with status code 500.

I am working in Visual Studio 2015, update 3 and I am using .NET Core RC2. Does anyone have any idea how to fix this and get my old projects running on this new machine?

Answer 1

this is an answer to an issue slightly different to what OP has posted. If the error message has just "dotnet.exe", not the full path of dotnet.exe("C:\ProgramFiles\DotNet\dotnet.exe"), then check if the dotnet.exe is in System.Environment path, if not add it and run VS as an admin

Answer 2

I have this issue right after updating Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 pro, so far I found 3 potential solutions :

• Restart Visual Studio works, sometimes,

• Delete %USERPROFILE%.nuget may solve the issue,

• Uninstall, then reinstall dotnet SDK,

Answer 3

In my case there was a setting in web.config and timeout was not defined properly, TFS placeholder was there instead of actual value requestTimeout="00:06:00"

Here is what it looks like. Hope it will be helpfull

<system.webServer>
    <handlers>
      <remove name="aspNetCore"/>
      <add name="aspNetCore" path="*" verb="*" modules="AspNetCoreModule" resourceType="Unspecified"/>
    </handlers>
    <aspNetCore processPath="%LAUNCHER_PATH%" arguments="%LAUNCHER_ARGS%" stdoutLogEnabled="false" stdoutLogFile=".\logs\stdout" requestTimeout="00:06:00" />
    <httpRedirect enabled="false" />
  </system.webServer>

Answer 4

VS2017 and solution has .NET Core 1.1 web applications.

This did not help: Deleting .VS folder, removing all bin directories, restarting VS.

This helped: Installed latest SDK (.NET Core SDK 1.0.4) this issue got resolved.

I got this issue all of a sudden after a machine reboot followed by installing PHP for IIS, IIS URL Rewrite. But just try reinstalling the SDK – it might work fine with that itself, instead of going for the latest SDK.

Answer 5

1. Close VS 2015 (it seems that the issue is resolved in VS 2017).
2. Remove all files in \bin and \obj. Remove project.lock.json.
3. Run VS.
4. Rebuild.

If the above solution doesnt work in VS2017 .Net Core, Run as VS2017 as ADMIN. If no ADMIN access to your machine, you can change the 'launchSettings.json' to work on port 8080 like below and after that follow above 4 steps.

"applicationUrl": "http://localhost:8080/",

Answer 6

I was having the same problem. I look for dotnet.exe in that directory and it exists but debugger cannot execute it, so i Restart Visual Studio 2015 as administrator and it works!