It’s funny, I thought my first SQL 2012 post would be something based around Clustering, AlwaysOn or admin fun but something cropped up today as regards Master Data Services (MDS) that I felt I should throw up there.

To say I’ve barely dealt with MDS is an understatement. I’ve never installed it, never worked with it, in fact I barely know what it does. As happens a request came in for it to be deployed for the dev folks to have a play around. The install appeared to have gone without any issues but then came the need to configure things using the MDS Configuration Mapper.

Upon launching the Configuration Mapper an error popped up as regards IIS and stopped everything in it’s tracks.

“The required .svc handler mappings are not installed in IIS”

Well gee, thanks Microsoft, that’s a really helpful error you’ve got there. Add on to that a lack of errors in the event logs and I figured it would be a dog to track down the problem.That’s Bing, not Ting – Image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/thecolourmill/3739742771/in/photostream/

First things first, I figured let’s try searching on the error, so I Bing’d it (yes people Bing, that’s my default search engine). The second result was promising, it led me to a Connect entry about the self same issue.

In the comments someone at Microsoft kindly thanked the submitter for finding the issue and stated “the fix for this issue will not be able to make this release”. Huh, never seen that before.

Fortunately there were a couple of post workarounds. The first one caught my attention. It mentions missing .svc handler mappings in IIS. A-ha, this looked promising I thought. I looked at the list of handlers, they all had 4.0 in them. Looks like a .NET thing I thought to myself.

I cracked open the IIS Manager and took a look at the installed Handler Mapping features. I could see .NET 2.0 components but not .NET 4.0 even though .NET 4.0 was installed on the system. This seemed like a case of .NET not being registered with IIS, something that was a serious pain back when .NET first came about and I had to deal with IIS installations (not something that I miss let me tell you).

I cracked open an elevated command prompt and drilled down to the .NET Framework 4.0 folder (cd %windir%Microsoft.NETFramework64v4.0.30319) and ran

aspnet_regiis.exe –i

which installs that version in IIS (there were no other sites on the server so I wasn’t concerned about impacting existing sites by changing their .NET version, read more about the switches before you do this).

With that complete, I did a reboot (I always like to try turning it off and back on again) and brought up the MDS Configuration Tool again. This time it was all happy and the configuration was able to continue.

Who said Connect was useless?