running classic asp on IIS 7 (Vista)

It's not that easy anymore (certainly not an out-of-the-box experience) to run classic asp on IIS 7. Yeah, just when you think you won't need the legacy asp anymore ...

Anyway, I found a good blog post on how to set it up for IIS 7 on Windows Vista and using a Microsoft Access Database. It might save you some time when you need it, but hopefully you won't need to go back to asp scripting again!

From Wikipedia :

Active Server Pages (ASP) was Microsoft's first server-side script engine for dynamically-generated web pages. It was marketed as an add-on to Internet Information Services (IIS).

ASP has gone through six major releases:

• ASP version 1.0 (distributed with IIS 3.0) in December 1996
• ASP version 2.0 (distributed with IIS 4.0) in September 1997
• ASP version 3.0 (distributed with IIS 5.0) in November 2000
• ASP.NET version 1.0 (part of the Microsoft .NET platform) in January 2002 (the pre-.NET versions are currently referred to as "classic" ASP)
• ASP.NET version 1.1 in April 2003
• ASP.NET version 2.0 (released on November 7, 2005)
• ASP.NET version 3.5 (released in November 2007)

Composite UI Application Block

This week I bought the book Programming Microsoft Composite UI Application Block and Smart Client Software Factory from the .NET Professor David Platt. Wanting to put his words into practice I tried to install the Composite UI Application Block and the Smart Client Software Factory on my Vista computer.

• Error installing the CAB_CS.msi
  
  
  
  I solved this error by running the command line tool as an administrator and starting the msi from there : msiexec /i "CAB_CS.msi".
• Error (error code 2869) installing the Smart Client Software Factory
  
  
  
  This time the Administrator trick did not solve the error at once. I also had to re-install the Guidance Automation Extensions and the Guidance Automation Toolkit.

Installations on Vista : not as painless as it should be ... remember to run software installations always as an administrator!

UPDATE : When you have only Visual Studio 2008 (beta 2) on your pc, you will receive installation error messages when installing the Smart Client Software Factory. Follow the instructions here to get the job done!

Dual boot problems - Vista?

I'm running a dual boot (Windows Server 2003 and Vista Ultimate) on my laptop for quite some time, but last week I did a re-install of Windows Server 2003. The first problem that came up was that the boot option for Vista disappeared. Vista was still installed on my hard drive, but the start-up option for Vista was gone. The first thing I tried to do was to recover the Vista boot with the recover option in the setup of the Vista install DVD. This worked out fine, except that I now lost the Windows Server 2003 boot option.

After some googling I found out that the Boot Loader for Vista has changed (no more boot.ini magic) ...

Windows Vista introduces a new boot loader architecture; a new firmware-independent boot configuration and storage system called Boot Configuration Data (BCD); and a new boot option editing tool, BCDEdit (BCDEdit.exe). These components are designed to load Windows more quickly and more securely.

A command-line tool (bcdedit.exe) is available in the system32 folder to modify the boot configuration data store. For those (like me) who are not familiar with the bcdedit.exe options and switches, you can download a freeware application (VistaBootPro) to easily and neatly organize the boot configuration entries from within all flavors of Windows. So I managed to add the Windows 2003 Server option back in my boot menu. Case closed!

Windows Vista Developer PC

On my laptop I have a dual boot with Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista Ultimate. The last couple of weeks I'm trying to move all my Visual Studio 2005 development solutions from the Windows Server 2003 OS to the Windows Vista OS. I can say that the move is almost complete but it wasn't as straightforward as I thought it was and some features are still not fully active.

An overview :

• Visual Studio 2005 is installed with the service pack for Windows Vista. Don't forget to always run Visual Studio as an administrator if you want to be able to do all your developer stuff as before! The connection from Visual Studio towards a Team Foundation Server works perfectly.
• IIS 7.0 on Vista Ultimate is disabled by default and you should carefully examine which (sub-)features you need to enable for your applications : application development features, security features, ...
• Installing SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition on Vista was the hardest part for me. I had to redo it a couple of times because of problems with the SQL Server 2005 Express Edition that was already installed with the Visual Studio 2005 installation. I had to do the uninstall of SQL Server 2005 manually and I could only re-install it with a new named instance of a SQL Server. There is a Service Pack for installing SQL Server 2005 on Vista but you first have to get the normal version installed. Tough job!
• One of my solutions makes use of transactions in .NET 2.0 and I had to enable the Network Distributed Transaction Coordinator Access on Vista. You can change those DTC settings in the Component Services (a snap-in for the Microsoft Management Console). Before that I was always getting MSDTC on server x is unavailable. This is something you probably have to do on other operating systems as well because this feature isn't always enabled by default, but I thought that it still deserves a place in my list here.

Still to do :

• Examine how to get my local SMTP server up-and-running. I'm only able to store the sent mail in a pickup directory, but I still can't get it sent through my localhost. There is no trace anymore of a mailroot folder in the inetpub directory ...
• The SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition is finally installed and working, but I still have to look at Reporting Services, Integration Services, ... These features are still to be installed and tested!