I never think that this is a difficult or exceptional. I never configure it before, because my job does not really require to deploy such configuration. Someday in the morning, one student asked me this question: Why I cannot run Reporting Service 2005 on my Vista? This guy used Vista as his development machine and SQL Server was running fine except the SSRS.
Well, I saw some documentation so I'm sure there is away to do it. The problem is not Vista specific. This is IIS 7 matter instead of Vista. Vista runs IIS 7, and so does Win Server 2008. IIS 7 has several breaking changes compare with IIS 6, and some developers do not really know how to deal with some changes. I decided to configure it on my Vista 64 bit desktop and worked like a charm. Nothing special, just couple of IIS 7 configurations and security setting. Here are the steps:
Step one: Make sure the Vista machine already upgraded to SP1. In Win Server 2008, It comes with SP1 by default.
Step two: Configure role services on IIS 7. This menu is accessible from IIS 7 setting or Control Panel > Program and Features. Make sure that the following features are activated:
IIS 6 Management Compatibility:
IIS 6 WMI Compatibility
IIS Metabase and IIS 6 configuration compatibility
Application Development Feature:
ASP.NET
ISAPI Extensions
ISAPI Filters
HTTP Features:
Default Document
Directory Browsing
HTTP Errors
HTTP Redirection
Static Content
These are the screen capture in my Windows Server 2008 machine:
The next step is to install SQL Server 2005, including Reporting Services, and proceed with SQL Server SP2 after that. After the installation finished, browse http://localhost/reports. The reporting services should run properly.
However, I noticed there are several small issues that may vary from machine to machine. If you got trouble to load SSRS after the above procedure, do some checking as follows:
Make sure the Reporting Services web sites (both reports and report server) run on top of the classic mode application pool. IIS 7 comes with 2 modes to run the pipeline: classic and integrated. The application pool for SSRS has to be in classic mode.
The complete step by step guide from Microsoft is here.