Before you can use Server 2008 (r1 or r2) as a Web Front End in your SharePoint farm, you’ll need to enable some new roles.
With a new release of Server, and a new release of SharePoint on their way, I will have many posts up here regarding installations, so for the sake of normalization, I’ll post a guide to adding these roles here, and refer to this post in future articles.
When you first start your Server 2008 box, you should get a panel for ‘Initial Configuration Tasks’. You may choose to ‘Add Roles’ from here, or launch Server Manager and add roles from there.
You’ll get the ‘Add Roles Wizard’, and you’ll need to choose ‘Web Server (IIS)’
Accept the prompts for prerequisites:
Add ‘ASP.Net’ and ‘Windows Authentication’ and accept prerequisites prompts again:
Finish the wizard, and you should get an ‘Installation Succeeded’ display:
Congratulations, you now have IIS and ASP.net working, so you can install SharePoint.