R – How to make IIS6 default to .Net 2.0 when creating a new web site

As already mentioned by another, I reference this post whenever I need to change the .NET settings for a site.

As for your question, the following steps (summarized from the linked post) should achieve what you need:

1. Run aspnet_regiis -lk from any .NET framework folder to list your current settings to help you determine which sites should remain using .NET 1.1. If you know there is a .NET 1.1 site, but it is not explicitly listed by this command, then it is inheriting from the root W3SVC/.

2. For all .NET 1.1 sites not explicitly listed by the previous command, you will need to force them to use .NET 1.1:

   1. Determine the Identifier ID of the site(s) which you want to force to use .NET 1.1. (Through the IIS 6 Manager, you can determine the Identifier of a site by clicking the "Web Sites" folder on the left side of the tool. On the right side, all your sites will be listed, and the Identifier column shows the ID.)
   2. From the .NET 1.1 framework folder, run aspnet_regiis -sn W3SVC/<Identifier ID>/ROOT/ where <Identifier ID> is the ID of the site which you want to force to use .NET 1.1.
3. Finally, change the root W3SVC/ to use .NET 2.0 so that all newly created sites will inherit from the root and default to use .NET 2.0. To change the root, from the .NET 2.0 framework folder, run aspnet_regiis -sn W3SVC/.

You can run aspnet_regiis -lk again to verify your settings.

I think you are attacking it from the wrong angle by trying to encode all posted data.

Note that a "<" could also come from other outside sources, like a database field, a configuration, a file, a feed and so on.

Furthermore, "<" is not inherently dangerous. It's only dangerous in a specific context: when writing strings that haven't been encoded to HTML output (because of XSS).

In other contexts different sub-strings are dangerous, for example, if you write an user-provided URL into a link, the sub-string "javascript:" may be dangerous. The single quote character on the other hand is dangerous when interpolating strings in SQL queries, but perfectly safe if it is a part of a name submitted from a form or read from a database field.

The bottom line is: you can't filter random input for dangerous characters, because any character may be dangerous under the right circumstances. You should encode at the point where some specific characters may become dangerous because they cross into a different sub-language where they have special meaning. When you write a string to HTML, you should encode characters that have special meaning in HTML, using Server.HtmlEncode. If you pass a string to a dynamic SQL statement, you should encode different characters (or better, let the framework do it for you by using prepared statements or the like)..

When you are sure you HTML-encode everywhere you pass strings to HTML, then set ValidateRequest="false" in the <%@ Page ... %> directive in your .aspx file(s).

In .NET 4 you may need to do a little more. Sometimes it's necessary to also add <httpRuntime requestValidationMode="2.0" /> to web.config (reference).