Okay, so I’ve started tinkering with MVC3 just to get familiar with what more-and-more people are working with now from a Windows Internet development perspective. I have a development/test VM running Windows Server 2008 R2 so I figured I’d install it there and walk-through some of the online tutorials.

Well, right out of the bat even the simple project templates don’t work for me. Each time it would throw an error upon running stating “Microsoft JScript runtime error: Not implemented”. After a lot of online searching, and trying suggested things like uninstalling and reinstalling the MVC3 Tools Update, I still couldn’t get past the issue.

Persistence has paid off though because I was able to follow a few trails and finally wind up a page that said the issue was specifically related to IE9 and running the environment on Windows Server 2008. The resolution is to enable the Desktop Experience on Windows Server 2008 (and R2). It seems that IE9 doesn’t fully support some of the features that the MVC3 JScript files try to reference by default – but it does with Desktop Experience enabled.

Here’s a link about the Desktop Experience and how to enable it on Windows Server 2008 (and R2):
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winservergen/thread/233bae03-4e9f-4dc6-89bc-0b729fbdf64a/

I made this configuration change (which required a reboot in the middle of the configuration), then reopened my MVC3 sample project, clicked Run and… No errors! So it seems like this really does resolve the issue. Yeah!