I downloaded the Personal Web Site Starter kit and attempted to run the Administration tool through Visual Web Developer 2008 express but it just says "An error was encountered. Please return to the previous page and try again." I am not using any sort of separate server software, just the ASP.NET development server. I have very limited knowledge in web development so any help would be great.

 Andy
 

checks IIS permission etc..

Do you have a app_data folder in the website check that you have write access to it?

Did you make any changes to the web.config yet, maybe the connectionstring?

Do you have sql express server installed and running?

Hope it helps, let know how you get on.

Thanks, the problem was that I had not set my Windows account as an administrator of my SQL server.

Pls I'm new to this, I have the same problem... how do you set windows accound as an administrator of SQL server.

To manually grant access to the ASP.NET user run the application commands from the command line:

For Windows Server 2003 family systems running IIS 6.0, replace <ASP.NET User Account> with 'NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE' in the following commands.
For all other cases replace <ASP.NET User Account> with 'MACHINENAME\ASPNET' where MACHINENAME is the name of your computer.
If you are working with the in build dev web server in vwd then enter your computername\yourusername

osql -E -S (local)\SQLExpress -Q "sp_grantlogin <ASP.NET User Account>"
osql -E -S (local)\SQLExpress -d ASPNETDB -Q "sp_grantdbaccess <ASP.NET User Account>"
osql -E -S (local)\SQLExpress -d ASPNETDB -Q "sp_addrolemember 'db_owner', <ASP.NET User Account>"

Note: The path to the osql.exe command must be located in your PATH environment variable

Hope it helps

Or you could do the following with a SQL Query (Using vwd or sql management studio)

To allow the Network Service account to manipulate data for the membership feature
(Change the user name as in the above post):

--Create a SQL Server login for the Network Service account
sp_grantlogin 'NT AUTHORITY\Network Service'
 
--Grant the login access to the membership database
USE aspnetdb
GO
sp_grantdbaccess 'NT AUTHORITY\Network Service', 'Network Service'
 
-- Add user to database role
USE aspnetdb
GO
sp_addrolemember 'aspnet_Membership_FullAccess', 'Network Service'
Hope it helps