I recently had a problem when trying to use the Performance Wizard for the first time in Visual Studio 2013 and on Windows 8.1 to profile an ASP.NET application. It’s part of what’s called the Performance and Diagnostics Hub.
The Performance Wizard is opened by choosing the Performance and Diagnostics item in the Debug menu, or by pressing Alt+F2.
I then proceeded to select an ASP.NET application,
and chose to start the wizard,
When starting the performance session, the output window showed the error:
The website metabase contains unexpected information or you do not have permission to access the metabase. You must be a member of the Administrators group on the local computer to access the IIS metabase. Therefore, you cannot create or open a local IIS Web site. If you have Read, Write, and Modify Permissions for the folder where the files are located, you can create a file system web site that points to the folder in order to proceed.
I started with the obvious by following the guidance in the error message, and checked whether I was a member of the Administrators group on the local computer – I was. I then figured there was something not quite right with my computer’s configuration and Googled the exact error message (I have to give Google credit for doing quite well with very long search terms), and came across a blog post from the Visual Studio Profiler Team Blog that showed how to fix the problem.
It turns out that there are some Internet Information Services (IIS) specific Windows features that need to be enabled that are not part of the default set of features that are typically enabled.
While the blog post refers to Visual Studio 2010, the information is still relevant to newer versions. See the following blog post for the full details on how to fix the problem: Tip: Fixing VSPerfASPNetCmd metabase errors.