Keith Smith's Blog : Quick Fixes

IIS.net DownloadCENTER Released

keiths — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 02:58:05 GMT

The DownloadCENTER at IIS.net is an inclusive community destination for discovering new components, modules and 3rd-party solutions related to the Internet Information Services (IIS) Web server.

With the worldwide release of Windows Vista tomorrow, this new section of IIS.net is particularly relevant to ASP.NET developers interested in the future of the Microsoft Web stack.

For example:

The latest release of IIS, IIS7, is included with Windows Vista and has a completely modular architecture which features over forty pluggable components that can be easily added, removed or even swapped with custom implementations.
The integrated pipeline gives ASP.NET developers a familiar event model and unified programming framework for enhancing the server.
The powerful extensibility support is available to both .NET (managed) and C/C++ (native).
The new management & configuration system and tools make it easier to setup your sites so you can spend less time troubleshooting and more time implementing.

There are already numerous downloads for all versions of IIS available today. Many are provided by Microsoft but, even more exciting are those contributed by the IIS community. In the future, the DownloadCENTER will host a large number of extensions specific to IIS7 submitted by Microsoft, ISVs and the broader IIS community.

To learn more about the DownloadCENTER, go check out Bill Staples’ blog post about it or, better yet, go visit today.

Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition (VWD) Registration Problems

keiths — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 01:52:00 GMT

Several users have encountered problems registering their copy of Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition after installation has completed. While the vast majority of user registrations complete without issue, there are some situations when the user is repeatedly prompted to register each time they start the application.

For CD installations, the registration reminder is shown the first 3 times the Express application is started regardless of whether the user has already registered. This is because there currently is no mechanism for the Express application to confirm the user has completed registration so it blindly reminds the user 3 times arbitrarily. This confusing user experience will be addressed in a future release. In the interim, ignore the subsequent registration reminders the next couple times you start the Express application.

If the information above does not solve the registration problems you are experiencing, please contact vsrghlp@microsoft.com. This applies for any of the other Express products as well.

Visual Studio 2005 Product Line Differences

keiths — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 20:18:00 GMT

I have noticed in several email and online discussions some have expressed confusion about how the different Visual Studio 2005 ("Whidbey") editions compare. There is an excellent feature matrix on MSDN offering a quick means of doing side-by-side comparisons for each product from the Express Editions to Team Suite.