Error - Unable to access the IIS metabase

Question

After installing Visual Studio 2012 and opening my solution I get a series of errors in this form:

The Web Application Project Foo is configured to use IIS.
Unable to access the IIS metabase. You do not have sufficient privilege to access IIS web sites on your machine.

I get this for each of our web applications. Things I have tried:

1. Running Visual Studio as Administrator
2. Running aspnet_regiis.exe -ga MyUserName
3. Running aspnet_regiis.exe -i

These seem to be common solutions for this problem but I have not had any success with them. Is there anything else I can try to do?

Answer 1

In my message, beside complaining about "Unable to access the IIS metabase", it also mentions can't access "<IISUrl>http://localhost:6416/</IISUrl>". Right click on the unload project, click Edit, find the line "<IISUrl>http://localhost:6416/</IISUrl>", comment it out. Reload and it should work. This has to do with administrator doesn't have permission to access that address.

Answer 2

I had this problem - the symptoms were the same, but the issue I had was that I had set the "My Documents" folder to be on a network share, and the share was not accessible.

The root problem was that the IIS config files located at %USERPROFILE%\Documents are not accessible. Once I changed the "My Documents" folder location (I modified the reg value), it started working again.

I know that this may not be a common scenario that you might run into, but I've posted it here because it gives the same symptoms.

Answer 3

You might run across this problem and have same problem as me. I "solved" it before and then power outage and computer crashed, not sure why a registry setting reverted but it is the SOURCE of my problem.

1. I tried all the running as adminstrator
2. All the IIS / IIS express re-installs.
3. Various "hacks"

Came down to having to fix the registry again.

1. Could not as administrator even open regedit (Need to access registry since problem is not with gpedit.msc admin template )

2. UnHookExec.inf on desktop

Just save UnHookExec.inf and install it by right clicking and selecting install. Installing the file will not show any popup or notice box. http://www.tweakandtrick.com/2011/04/enable-regedit-registry-editor.html

3. HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders\Personal pointing to non-existant fileshare. Changing that to local path solved this problem for me. – Pasi Savolainen Jul 14 '14 at 8:41

(changed from \\cs2data\home\stickelt\my documents to c:\dev )

Now ALL is good and Visual Studio opened solution with 15 projects and connects to IIS and does not complain about not being able to access iis metadata

I had never ran into this before, as nobody at current job had this problem ( many have been here a long time, some got clones of other machines that "worked" and many are on another domain etc.. )

Answer 4

I had the same problem after Adding feature from this link afterward I followed this article the issue was gone.

Answer 5

In addition to the answer by @nologo, I also had to use IIS. So I changed the

<UseIIS>True</UseIIS>

to 'False' first.

• Opened the solution and ensured that the project could be loaded.
• Close solution and that instance of Visual Studio
• Change the value to 'True' again
• Open the solution. This time, I didn't get any error/warning. I could also run with Ctrl+F5 or F5 without any problem while my project was mapped to an IIS website.

Answer 6

I also had a similar problem. My solution is an extension to the answer "Run as admin" which I hope someone might find useful.

I was running VS2012 and almost every time I had to do the Right Click, Run As Administrator. I got tired of this so instead I went into its properties on the shortcut, clicked advanced, and then clicked the "Run as Administrator" option. Now VS2012 always runs as administrator whenever I open it from that shortcut.

The from that shortcut bit is important. I proceeded to branch my project, and download the branch to a new local folder. Then, when I opened it from the shortcut I had no problem. But if I went directly into the folder, and ran the project locally without the shortcut, it did not run as administrator and I got this error.

Once I opened VS2012 as usual first, then using File/Open/Project It worked again no problem. (because I was running as admin). But I wasn't running as admin when I opened the solution using windows file manager.

The other suggestions seem somewhat extreme, but this is pretty simple so I would tend to give this a try first.

Hope this was helpful.