Unable to access the IIS metabase. You do not have sufficient privilege to access IIS web sites on your machine.

Question

I have a .NET 4.0 WCF solution that I am trying to load in VS2012 for the purposes of converting to VS2012 / .NET 4.5.  VS2012 properly detects that the project should be hosted by IIS and tries to alter the metabase for the virtual application.  Unforunately, it blows up with the following error:

The Web Application Project Acme.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.

Note, I am logged in as my domain user account on Windows Server 2012.  This user is a local admin.  Note, the UAC level is turned all the way down (Never notify).

Please advise.

Answer 1

I don't know how this works on Windows 2012, but on Windows 2008 you had to install metabase access separately as a sub component of IIS, maybe you even need IIS6 metabase compatibility turned on.

Answer 2

Apparently, you must run visual studio as Administrator or metabase modifications will fail.

Answer 3

Hi,

I'm having the same issue and starting Visual Studio as administrator fixed the problem. However, I can't believe that I will always have to run VS as admin... 

Is there any other way to fix this problem?

Thanks and regards,

Matthieu