lextm / ancm-arm64

Installer patches for ASP.NET Core module on Windows 11 ARM64

ancm-arm64, installer patches for ASP.NET Core module on Windows 11 ARM64 and IIS.

Background

The official installer for .NET 7.0/8.0 at this moment only properly installs ASP.NET Core module ARM64 bits on the machine, so that only pure ARM64 ASP.NET Core web apps can run on IIS.

Note that .NET 6.0 web apps can only run in x64/x86 modes on IIS/Windows 11 ARM64.

The changes made by this repo have been delivered to Microsoft ASP.NET Core team in dotnet/aspnetcore/issues/47115. However, they decided that no immediate action to take. You can vote it up to indicate how important the patch is, and help prioritize the solution to be made into the future installers.

I also wrote about my investigation on this topic in details and hope you find it useful.

Preparation

1. Download the original 64 bit installer from Microsoft.

2. Download WiX Toolset if it isn't installed to %ProgramFilesX86%\WiX Toolset v3.11\bin\.

3. Extract all contents from Microsoft installer using dark.exe with

   dark.exe dotnet-hosting-7.0.4-win.exe -x .\msi

At last, all useful bits are in \msi\AttachedContainer folder, such as AspNetCoreModuleV2_*.msi. This folder is going to be used for patching.

Note that here we use .NET 7.0.4 as an example. It applies to other versions (including .NET 8 Preview) till Microsoft officially ships the necessary changes in future releases.

Apply the Patch

1. Execute the official installer to get ARM64 bits installed to IIS.
2. Execute patch.ps1 -msiFolder <folder> as administrator so that it extracts the necessary files from those MSI packages and install to the desired places.

   Note that this install script also installs a few helper files compiled by me. They are ARM64X pure forwarder required for ARM64/x64 side by side execution. The source code and build script are in src folder.

Restore to Default

1. Execute restore.ps1 as administrator.