I need to get a classic asp project up and running but do not have IIS installed on my computer. Is there away to run the project without it? I currently have visual studio 2005
thanks
jason
There is something called Abyss Web Server - I've never used it myself so can't vouch for it but from its description and features it looks promising.
If money is the issue, Microsoft came up with IIS Express some while ago which is free to download and use and from this question looks like it's supporting classic ASP as well.
I have no idea whether you can even get hold of this software anymore but Sun used to maintain a project called Sun One Active Server Pages (aka ChilliSoft ASP) which allowed you to run ASP sites without IIS
There may be some weird and wacky solutions (like a "compiler" to ASP.NET etc) out there, however I really doubt any such thing would be worth it.
I would make more sense to pursue the answer to this question: "Why don't you install IIS on your machine?".
godaddy.
$5/month until you cancel it.
instant gratification
call them now, and then start building your asp app a few hours later.
why hassle with the path you are inclining towards?
I have accidently deleted the default-website on an "experimental" machine.
It is a standard-installation of "Windows Web Server 2008" with II7 running.
I have already tried to create a custom website on my own, but this always fails when I try to access the website in the browser (remote and locally). There is an endless number of permission- and setting - errors.
Could you please show me a link to a tutorial on what to do in my case?
Or possibly any suggestions what common pitfalls are in such situations?
Thank you!
Daniel Lang
Make sure your site points to %systemdrive%\inetpub\wwwroot, and then it has little difference from the default one.
Learning about how to back up IIS settings on IIS is a must for beginners,
http://mvolo.com/blogs/serverside/archive/2007/03/18/Most-Important-AppCmd-Commands_3A00_-Backing-up-and-restoring-IIS7-configuration.aspx
Save your custom code (virtual directories) and reinstall IIS? Probably cleanest.
Just getting started on a project to migrate from win 2003 iis6 to win 2008 / IIS7, and after reading the MS documentation and also various articles I am a little confused, as it states a site needs to have one or more applications.
However I have setup a new site pointed at my .Net 3.5 directory and it works.
This means that ....
A- I am seeing things.
B- A site does not actually need one or more applications.
Can anyone explain the above behaviour? and or point me to any useful articles that explain site, applications etc... to me.
The app pool is in classic pipeline mode, not sure if this is a problem.
Many thanks,
Your guess in a comment is correct - a web site itself also acts as an application and does not require an explicit application subfolder.
Here's some links that helped me with understanding IIS 7.0
Configuration reference
Operation Guide
I've found that on some occasions I can edit the source while debugging. Are there any other advantages of using the Visual Studio built-in webserver instead of a virtual directory in IIS?
I'm using Windows XP on my development environment, and a local instance of IIS 5. I work on several projects, so I use multiple virtual directories to manage all the different sites.
Are there any disadvantages?
The built-in web server for Visual Studio is called Cassini and here are a few of its limitations...
It can host only one ASP.NET
application per port.
It does not support HTTPS.
It does not support authentication.
It responds only to localhost
requests.
It is slow startup compared to IIS
All the previous responses are great answers - here's one gottcha with Cassini that might require IIS on the destkop.
Cassini runs in the context of the developer, not as the IIS user (IUSR_, IWAM, or in WinXP x64, the w3wp process). This can be a bit painful if you've got a web site that is accessing external files or creating temp files. It is most evident when your developer is running as an Admin of their desktop.
When you move to the server IIS, something that you would have had access to in Cassini doesn't work the same. CACLing with the IIS_WPG usually is all it takes to fix, but if your developer is not thinking about this, they will quickly get quite frustrated with their deploy.
Cassini does not support virtual directories.
It looks like a third option is coming soon:
IIS Express.
Another disadvantage I've run into is on a Forms authenticated website using custom IPrincipal/IIdentity. Cassini will switch the AppDomains without warning (or notice).
Check this blog post for more.The headache on this made me drop Cassini and stick with IIS.
The Visual Studio web server is less forgiving about // in the path.
It will refuse to serve a link like
http://localhost:52632/main//images/logo.jpg where IIS will do.
That's pretty obscure, but it means we have a lot of fixing to do to get rid of all the // occurrences.
The built-in server works well for larger corporations that don't want to give developers any administrator access on their own machines to configure IIS.
There's a bug in the way the built-in server handles HTTPModules - there is a workaround, but I hate having to put in code that'll never be needed in production.
You need to have Visual Studio running to use it (under normal circumstances)
It only responds to localhost, so you can't give the link http://simon-laptop:37473/app1 to a friend to view your site over the network
Big disadvantage: it's harder to get fiddler working, because localhost traffic isn't sent through the proxy.
Using http://ipv4.fiddler:37473 is the best way to get Fiddler working with it.
You cant use virtual directories :(
Cassini also does not support ASP Classic pages. This is only an issue for legacy projects where old ASP Classic pages still exist (like our web application at work).
The built-in server means the developer doesn't have to know how to set up IIS to test their site.
You could argue this is a disadvantage, and that a Windows developer should know at least that much IIS. Or you could argue that a developer who isn't a system administrator shouldn't be messing around with the web server at all.
If you 'web reference' the URL for web services that are on the built-in webserver, the port might change. Unless you have set a "Specific port" mentioned in menu Project → Properties options page.
This is something I've gotten used to now. I always set a specific port. Now when sometimes the webserver crashes (I've had that happen), I simply change the port number, and all is well. I reckon restarting will also fix this.
If you do hobby work at home using XP Home, you can't install IIS locally.
When you use IIS in Vista or Windows 7 with UAC enabled, you must run Visual Studio with administrative rights. If you do this, you can't drag an drop from your shell to Visual Studio (even if you run an instance of explorer.exe as administrator).
For this reason I use Cassini for most projects.
FYI, Windows XP 64-bit comes with IIS 6.
This is an old thread started 2 years ago. I just stumbled upon UtilDev Cassini while googling. Looks promising to me. At least it has the ability to run multiple sites simultaneously. That feature is really useful for me, because I work on 2 different sites and have to continuously switch between them using IIS.
Here's a reason for a third way: although UWS Pro is probably closer to IIS than Cassini (although inspired by Cassini and is from the vendor of the UltiDev Cassini fork), its main purpose is to be redistributable along with ASP.NET applications.
Cassini is meant to be a lightweight test webserver. The idea is that a developer does not need to have IIS installed and configured to test his/her application.
Use IIS if you are familiar with it and you have it set up and your box can handle it. Cassini is not meant to be a replacement.
I often take the best of both worlds and create an application in IIS, and use the built-in web server for more efficient debugging.
The built-in server isn't as configurable, and it runs on an odd port, so if you're counting on specific behavior it can be troublesome.
Install IISAdmin, and you can setup separate sites in IIS 5, instead of using virtual directories.
The built-in webserver is a little less robust than IIS, but requires no setup so it is just a tradeoff.
You may not always want your development projects exposed on your IIS server (even your local IIS server) so the built-in server is good for that.
However, if your application is going to access resources outside of the norm for a web app then you may want to debug frequently in IIS so that your app will run with restricted permissions and you can see where the pain points will be.
One difference I've found is that the development server handles uploading files differently than IIS does. You can't trap the error if the file being uploaded is bigger than your Max_File_Size setting. The page just dies and returns a 500.
Another dis-advantage is that it sends every request through the gloabal asax file which includes all requests for images and stylesheets. This means if you have code in there which does things with the file names, such as a look up, then the auxillary files willget processed too.
Also via IIS, you don't have to worry about automatically remembering and setting a stupid port number in your localhost url. That's something funky directly relied upon with Cassini...big pain in the ass. Who wants to remember some abritrary port number. Just run the damn site in IIS..plain and simple.
We've also seen some issues with Visual Studio built-in server regarding some third-party controls which put their scripts in the \aspnet_client folder.
Since the folder isn't there when you're not running under IIS, the controls didn't work. It seems a lot simpler to always work with IIS and avoid strange problems.
If your project resides in the IIS directory you can still edit code. It just depends if it has been published or not.
You will run into so many issues on the Cassini vs. IIS when you are debugging certain permission based scenarios, like Kerberos and NTLM authentication as well as issues like server compression, etc. All in all, the Cassini is still okay to develop with, but make sure you do extensive testing when publishing to IIS.
Can WampServer be used successfully in production? Is this a bad idea?
So everyone knows, and I don't see how this mattered, we've paid for a windows dedicated box and we have existing IIS apps. We just wanted to use a PHP based CMS which installs easier on apache (since it has some dependencies). So, as the title indicated, windows, apache, php, and mysql are requirements.
Additionally, I'm talking specifically of the WampServer flavor of WAMP.
If you're not going onto the internet, there isn't any reason really not to. Of course you'd have to look at all the normal caveats - backups etc.
Instead of using an already made one, why not try to do your own? It would be a good learning experience and really they aren't that hard to get working together.
WAMP is approriate for production of an Intranet. We developed a solution with FLEX (front END) /PHP/MYSQL (BACKEND) and it's been working very well for a year now. You just have to secure the Server on which WAMP runs. WAMP is just a tool for configuring APACHE/PHP/MYSQL on a Windows plateform with ease.
WampServer themselves says they are not appropriate for production, only for development. Security issues, load balancing, etc., are definitely part of it... plus, deploying Apache on Windows is just a nightmare.
Use LAMP. Alternatively, use IIS... if you're going to deploy a Windows production server (don't), use IIS.
LAMP is more stable, but i have wamp running intranet-sites succesfully in two organisations with over a 1000 users.
I don't see why not, but why use Apache on Windows when you can quite easily install PHP on IIS?
I love how the only guy who answered the actual question by paying attention to the fact that the OP was asking about the all in one product that is WampServer has a -1 rating. To reiterate what he said though, yes it would be a bad idea to use it in a production environment.
I'm using WAMP over Windows Server 2003 as a production server for an Intranet. accesing MySQL and SQL Server toghether.
We are not too many users, but I had no problem so far.
Easy configuration, easy maintenance, posibility to autenticate domain users in Apache...
Perhaps with heavy load environments it's not so good, but for me is the perfect sollution by now.
YES, it can be used in production under condition that you install the secure WAMP distro. And yes it can run on Internet and not just intranet.
Here is a link to a secure WAMP for production where you can customize the security level and other settings to suit production environment.
http://securewamp.org/en/
Windows and WAMP can be successfully used in production even on high traffic websites however you will need to make changes and switch from mod_php to FCGID.
Why not just use LAMP? PHP code is portable. I used WAMP for development, LAMP for production.
WAMP would probably work for production, but why not just use LAMP?