Vista and Visual Studio 2005

Posted Sunday, April 22, 2007 by Steven T Webster in DotNetNuke Current Rating:

I spent the weekend installing a fresh copy of Windows Vista on my development laptop. Getting everything re-installed and configured to run Visual Studio, Deklarir and DotNetNuke again took some doing. Here is what I learned

I recently purchased a new Dell for my wife. It came with Windows Home Basic on it. After the initial shock of finding control panel items, getting connected to the network, etc I decided it was time to upgrade my main development machine from XP. Here is a step by step guide to what I did to get Vista installed and working with Visual Studio and DotNetNuke:

Preparing the Laptop

I'm running a Dell Inspiron 9400 with a Duo Pentium 1.66 and a Gig of RAM. Performance on XP was decent (better than the desktop I replaced) but with SQL Server, IIS, VS2005, a couple of broswers and Outlook running things weren't screaming along. So, to prepare for this upgrade I added another gig of RAM.

Upgrading (err installing) Windows

My network admin cautioned me that upgrading XP can cause some issues with our volume licensing and some of the installed Dell utilities and drivers can conflict with those installed with Vista. I noticed this on my wife's laptop too. It was literally an out of the box Vista install and on boot the Sonic CD burner driver from Dell throws a conflict error since Vista installed it's own burner software. So, I decided to copy off all my files, format my C drive and install a fresh copy of Vista Business.

(Note: I was surprised at how quickly and smoothly Vista installed on my machine.)

And Now, for The Rest of the Software:

Install SQL Server Developer Edition
Install Visual Studio 2005
Install SQL Server 2005 SP2
Install Visual Studio 2005 SP1
Install Visual Studio 2005 SP1 for Vista

Configure IIS

This was the tricky part. I found a number of individual references on setting up II6 compatibility and other items, but finally got everything setup in IIS correctly. To "turn on" the correct features:

Go to Start | Control Panel
Click on Programs
Under Programs and Features click on Turn Windows Features On or Off
Windows will ask your permission to continue - click continue
Expand the IIS Management Compatibility section and Select All
Expand the Application Development Features and Select All but CGI
Expand the Common HTTP Features and Select All
Click the OK button

Running Visual Studio

Running VS2005 is pretty much the same, except that you need to right mouse click on the icon and select Run as Administrator. A warning will appear then VS will open...you will get one more warning from VS...click OK.

If you've configured everything correctly you should be able to create a new web project now.

CATEGORIES: DotNetNuke