“There was an error while performing this operation”

Question

I have a website in IIS for which I cannot open any of the settings like Authentication, Handler Mappings, Authorization Rules etc. It just shows the error message \"There was a

Answer 1

Similar to the marked solution here, I had the same problem and again it was a missing IIS module, but this time it was the Application Initialization Module that was required, not URLRewrite. installing via the Web Platform Installer or IIS.net. fixed the problem.

Steps I took to debug this though was to section by section go through my web config removing each section and attempting to load the site and/or let IIS parse the config. When I removed the section pertaining to initialization optimisation this fixed the issue and I immediately remembered that this dependency was added a fair while ago.

Echo the sentiments though that this really needs better error messages!!!