The Problem

When trying to locally debug a newly created solution within Visual Studio 2015 I encountered the below error when locally launching the application using IIS Express

A process with the ID of <id> is not running

ASP.NET Logo

Seeing no errors logged in the Visual Studio Output window, I checked the Windows Event Viewer and found the following error:

The Module DLL C:\Program Files (x86)\IIS Express\aspnetcore.dll failed to load. The data is the error.

The error was a bit confusing because it alluded to ASP.NET Core even though I wasn’t using this in my project.

The Solution

It turns out that there was a reference to aspnetcore.dll within the below file within my solution

<SOLUTION_ROOT>\.vs\config\applicationhost.config

After commenting out the “AspNetCoreModule” entries I re-opened the solution within Visual Studio and the application launched without issue yay!

I’m not quite sure how the reference got there – I assume the original developer of the solution had been playing around with ASP.NET Core at some point in time?

Windows Event Viewer Screenshot
Shane Bartholomeusz