I think it has to have the <%@ Page ... > directive so that the ASP parser knows to interpret it. Just make a Default.aspx and you'll see how it's got that at the very beginning of the page. And if you've got VS, then there's no reason not to just use it to create your pages; doing it the hard way will just get in the way and cause silly things like this.

Thanks for your reply!

I took your advice and created a brand new aspx page in VS, leaving the standard <%@ Page... declaration at the top. I try to run the page, and it's still trying to output as xml, only this time it's throwing an error because it doesn't like the "%" and is claiming it's badly formed xml - I've attached the error message that I'm getting.

It just seems like there's something fundamental that I have set up wrongly, or something that I haven't set up at all...

Any ideas?

That's just really weird. I have no idea why it would do that. Maybe double-check your configs, but other than that I'm out of ideas. Sorry I can't help

you havent configured IIS right

i had this before with server 2003. it was set up for ASP not ASP.NET so showed the XML instead of parsing it

This is because ,I think you installed IIS after you installed the VS. If,so try configure IIS using ASPNETREGIIS utility.At VS Command prompt type

:\>ASPnet_Regiis -i

this will configure your IIS.

I am not sure this will solve your problem.But try this

no you need to set up IIS for .NET, IIS by default only does classic ASP (or at least, server 2003 does it this way, not sure about xp pro)