IIS management console presents blank window

You open the IIS management console using Inetmgr and you are presented with a empty console no application pools, no web sites, no virtual directories.

This happens occasionally on IIS 6 /IIS 7 which is hosting SharePoint sites. The very quick fix for this issue is restarting Sharepoint's OWSTimer service or make an IISRESET.


Microsoft support explains as follows

"Consider the following scenario. You have a process that has more than one thread. Additionally, the process uses the Internet Information Services (IIS) Active Directory Service Interfaces (ADSI) provider to access IIS. Two threads access IIS at the same time. In this scenario, you may be unable to manage IIS by using Server Manager"

Microsoft provides a hot fix for this nasty issue, that can be downloaded from the following link

FIX: You may be unable to manage IIS by using Server Manager if two threads access IIS at the same time

SharePoint development VM loves IISReset

When we develop application pages or custom web part development in SharePoint. This requires a lot of IISreset for each and every bit of change in the assembly when we are going to deploy these modified binaries GAC.

IISRESET takes a lot of time instead of that if we recycle the required application pool which is associated to our IIS web application, this will save atleast a minute of dev effort.

This recycling process can be automated by using the following OOB VB script

cscript.exe iisapp.vbs /a SharePointAppPool /r

or
cscript.exe iisapp.vbs /p [Process ID] /r

[Process ID] : This can be obtained just by executing iisapp.vbs in the command line. This will list all the application pools with their process ids

Get more info about IISapp.vbs from Microsoft Technet library

Do you want to recycle all the application pools in your IIS ?

Save the following the VB script to vbs file and replace the MachineName with your Dev machine's name

Set locator = CreateObject("WbemScripting.SWbemLocator")
Set Service = locator.connectserver("MachineName", "root/MicrosoftIISv2")
Set APCollection = Service.InstancesOf("IISApplicationPool")
For Each APInstance In APCollection
APInstance.Recycle
Next