Use Classic ASP with Access Databases in Windows 10

Jimbo's picture
Submitted by Jimbo on Sun, 12/22/2019 - 10:35

IIS LogoThere was a time when the best development platform produced by Microsoft was Notepad. IIS was relatively new and dynamic pages were served by Active Server Pages or "ASP".

As older servers are mothballed, newer servers come online, but custom applications remain the same when they work. Porting a classic ASP application to a modern .Net system requires esoteric skills in both and those don't come cheap.

Classic ASP isn't installed by default in Windows 10 (or other more modern operating systems), but it is still supported. It merely needs to be activated.

Start in Control Panel and turn on ASP as a Windows feature. It will automatically turn on ISAPI Extensions as a requirement of ASP.

In Internet Information Services Manager, add an Application Pool with the settings like this. This will be used when the application is created.

This step appears to be optional as the ASP code works without 32-bit applications enabled. The programmer that I credit below includes this step in his explanation, so I include it here as an optional step.

Now add the application in the folder where the application will run. In this case, the application is in the root folder.

Copy the ASP files to the folder of the web server. The ASP files do not go into the "Physical path" of the application--that is where the web.config file will reside.

ASP MemeTroubleshooting is key

By default, the server will throw custom error messages when an error occurs. The default custom error in IIS for Windows 10 is a link to Microsoft's website explaining that ASP isn't installed by default.

In order to see the actual error message, set the Send Errors To Browser to "True". This will stop the server from telling the user that ASP isn't installed by default in Windows 10.

Connecting to an Access database file from ASP...

If a Microsoft Access database file is the back engine for the application, then connecting to it is a breeze. Be sure to get the 64-bit version of the Microsoft Access Database Engine 2010 and install it on the Windows 10 computer.

After installing the Access Database Engine, change any providers in the source code from "Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0" to "Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0". Now the application that worked fine on Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 will work fine on Windows 10. 

    Dim strFile, strSQL, Conn, rs, rs2, rs3, rs4, rs5
    Set Conn = CreateObject("ADODB.Connection")
    rem Conn.Provider = "Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0"
    Conn.Provider = "Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0"
    Conn.Open "c:\application\YourDatabase.mdb"

Credit where it is due . . .

Special thanks to Edi Wang for this great article explaining how to coax ASP to life on Windows 10 in a way that even dinosaurs from the 1980's can can understand.

Special thanks to the folks who contributed to this article on StackOverflow.com. It took a little experimentation, but it turns out that the 64-bit version of the Access Database Engine 2010 is required for ASP in Windows 10; the 32-bit version did not work.

Dilbert Database