Windows Insider AND Doing Web Development? Read this!

If you’re a Windows Insider who also does web development or uses IIS at all, then you should know about this issue which just caused me to loose 2 hours of my life.

What happens if you’re on build 14942 is that IIS won’t do anything and the World Wide Web Publishing Service won’t start, with a super unhelpful message to tell you to look in the Event Log. In the Event Log, you’ll see this equally vague message:

The World Wide Web Publishing Service service terminated with the following service-specific error:
The dependency service or group failed to start.

It turns out that this is a known issue with this build (thanks windowscentral.com). There is a workaround though:

• Insiders doing web development may find themselves their local intranet server unreachable, as service host separation will leave the IIS World Wide Web Publishing Service (W3Svc) unable to start successfully. To fix this issue:
• Run the following from an admin cmd line (or edit the registry accordingly):
• REG ADD HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W3SVC /v SvcHostSplitDisable /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
• REG ADD HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WAS /v SvcHostSplitDisable /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
• Reboot the system, so that the W3Svc and WAS services share a service host process.

This worked for me 🙂