Follow up Questions from Day 1
We've had an unbelievable turn out so far. We are in Ottawa this morning and we've got people sitting on the floor during our first Development Breakout Session. Over the course of the launch tour I'll blog as many of the common questions we receive that other will likely find useful.
Q1. What's the story with the Web Site Administration Tool/Migration path to SQL Server?
A1. One of the great new features of VS2005 is the new ASP.Net Development Server. This allows you to develop web application locally on your development machine without having to install IIS. In addition, you have the Web Site Administration Tool (WSAT) which you can use to configure the web development server (for example secure a directory, create roles, etc..) and by default this data is stored in SQL Express. The WSAT Tool itself only works with the ASP.Net development server. What happens if I configure a number of roles and security policies and then I want to move this to a production environment using IIS.
There are a number of migration possibilities. The schema is the same for SQL Express or SQL Server however to avoid any potential difficulties there is an upsize tool that will allow you to migrate from Express to SQL Server. Have a look at Scott Guthrie's blog on a project/tool they are working on for more information on the tool itself. (http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2005/10/15/427581.aspx)
