Michael Freidgeim's Blog

If you are working with Web Site porjects, VS 2005 Web Setup Project out-of-the-box is almost useless. The only option is to add content (including source code files).

The recommended solution  is to publish web project to create  precompiled web application.

 Then you can add Procomiled site content to Web Setup Project.

Note that you will see VS warning that precompiled Web Site is not recommended to be added to solution.

When you will build Web Setup Project, the error will be shown

Error 1 This application is already precompiled. 

You have to ignore both warning and error to make MSI built.

It is not user friendly process!

If you are working with Web Application Projects(WAP), see ScottGu's Creating Packaged ASP.NET Setup Programs with VS 2005  (thanks to Dave's comment below for pointing to the article).

I had a working DotNetNuke project 4.0.2 with .Net 2.0 that I wanted to publish to Windows Server 2003.

However when I opened the published web site, I've got an error:

Parser Error Message: Unrecognized attribute 'requirePermission'.

Source Error:

Line 4: <sectionGroup name="dotnetnuke">
Line 5: <!-- the requirePermission attribute will cause a syntax warning - please ignore - it is required for Medium Trust support -->
Line 6: <section name="data" requirePermission="false" type="DotNetNuke.Framework.Providers.ProviderConfigurationHandler, DotNetNuke"/>

After some search in Google I recognized that the published site is running .Net 1.1 instead of expected 2.0.

I had to change application pool to be ASP.NET 2.0(how to do this see e.g. Create the Application Pool  and Move the Virtual Server to the New Application Pool ) and  then run

%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_regiis  -s W3SVC/1/ROOT/DotNetNuke

to fix the problem. Note that  DotNetNuke should be replaced with actual name of your virtual directory and 1 with the actual number of your web site (1 for default web site).