I'm using the built in web server in Visual Studio to test some pags but I wanted to be able to connect to it from other machines to test out browsers on different platforms. I was wondering if it was possible to configure that server to listen to an external interface or if I have to throw this over to IIS. I've turned off the windows firewall so that shouldn't be an issue.
Not with the default ASP.NET Development Web Server. You could probably use Cassini if you don't want to use IIS.
I would use SVN and setup a test server to automatically have the SVN updated on the tested server.
What I have done in the past is setup a SVN repository and add my sites into it. And on the test server setup a running copy of the repository and have a scheduled task automatically update it every 5mins. This works great since I dont have to worry about ftping or any thing. Works great since I use VisualSVN and Commenting my changes is easy.
Related
I've created an Azure server instance. I've deployed a simple application to it. As part of the deployment process I enabled Remote Desktop Connections.
I have some standard ASP.net applications that run on Windows, is there something to stop me deploying these applications manually to IIS using Remote Desktop. I've read so much about having to migrate standard ASP.net apps to Azure. I don't want to this as we will have customers who will still use Windows Server 2003/2008 so I don't want to have to maintain 2 versions.
Well, as I understand it, in theory you could deploy stuff using remote desktop. But when the instance shuts down/restarts you'll lose it all (unless you've built it into your startup scripts) and have to re-load everything each time. The main reason they suggest you have at least two instances is so that when one shuts down for updates etc there is always at least one other running.
The "Windows Azure Accelerator for Web Roles" project allows you to create an Azure web role which then enables you to use web deploy for all your other web sites - I'm guessing that will be a whole lot better approach and is definitely worth a look. Also, I believe smarx.com is a good place to browse for info and ideas.
Using a startup task and the Azure Bootstrapper you can download, unzip, install almost any kind of 3rd party software that supports either xcopy deployment (just copy the files) or an unattended(silent) install.
Assuming you aren't using Azure storage or anything like that, there shouldn't be any difference with the IIS application. If you are using anything specific to Azure, you can use the RoleEnvironment.IsAvailable to test if you are running inside Azure or not. That will return true for the emulator as well. If you want to use Azure storage from both, you can add the settings in the web.config to use if not running in Azure.
So here is my situation. I have a laptop that I want to be able to do mobile development on. If I have to travel for a week or so I still want to be able to use TFS, however I may not be able to access my main server. I mainly code in C# .NET running Windows 7. The TFS Proxy would be on a VM running Server 2008 R2 that I would spin up while on the road.
Is it feasible to use TFS Proxy as an offline solution?
No, it only caches files (get) and only the files that have been 'get' before through this proxy server. For things like the history, check out or checkin in you need the real TFS server. It also does not cache work items.
PS: There is TFS Offline mode. Here is an old description.
EDIT
It seems the next TFS version will support this offline scenario much better. Read more about it here.
I want to now what is the easiest way to deploy asp.net site to a windows server? Normally we do by uploading files through FTP client.
But as we can checkout repository on linux server and just running "svn up" command though SSH deploys the latest changes, is there any similar way on windows?
Thanks
Web deployment tool is what I use. It can be automated from the command line, and MSBuild can be used to generate deployment packages if you use a CI server. On the simplest level though it supports 1 click deploy from the toolbar in Visual Studio (probably only recommended to development servers).
You can do nearly the same thing on Windows.
Use Remote Desktop Connection to
access the server (this is the
windows counterpart of SSH)
Run "svn
up"
An SVN client doesn't ship with Windows, but the client ports from SilkSVN and CollabNet work just as well as any other.
We do ASP.NET Development using Visual Studio.
A discussion point we've just had is whether or not our developers should have IIS installed.
With the ASP.NET Development Server you can run your web apps without IIS. Once you're happy with everything you can then deploy it to a test server running IIS and then onto Live.
In my opinion, all developers should also have IIS installed on their own machines as that will eventually be the end platform for the application.
The arguments are basically if the developer should have as close to "live" an environment as possible, or if the developer should only have the tools they require and not be cluttered with other things.
None of this is missions critical and I'm sure everyone will have a differing opinion. I'm just interested to hear some of them!
Robin
I'm going to say unequivocally yes. IIS and Cassini are not the same and not exposing your code to production conditions can cause you problems. Better to get yourself in the habit as early as possible.
(obviously you can replace "IIS" with "Apache" or whatever your webserver tech is)
I would say that you don't need to have IIS installed, but that you should test on IIS at some point.
The Development Web Server has two "issues":
it only works for local requests
ALL requests are passed through ASP.net
Especially the second point can really open ways to shoot you in the foot. "Why can people access SuperSecretPicture.jpg? I have a Handler in my Web.config that blocks that!".
But if you know about those limitations, then I find that the Development Web Server is better to start with since you can first focus on your code and then about your environment, but YMMV.
The bottom line is if your application is served by IIS, you should be testing on IIS. If that means IIS on your local machine or a dev server is up to you.
What harm can it do having it installed? At least if you have it installed you can choose to use it or not. The day you need to debug a webservice call from an externally hosted application you don't want to be messing around installing it.
Depends - are you running server versions of windows for you dev boxes?
Because, e.g. the XP version of IIS is different from 2000/2003 server, so you'll get a different experience. Similarly, if you develop on Vista but plan to deploy on 2003, it won't be a "complete" experience.
We have IIS installed on our local machines at our work for development purposes. We need to test the web applications against IIS, but neither do we want to release it to our live server, or to our test server as that requires a lot of work. Instead, we just host it locally and everytime we modify a file through Visual Studio we can then instantly see the changes without having to go through a file copying process.
I don't think it's a bad thing at all, as long as everything's secure you'll be fine.
Ideally your test server should mirror your production server. That should go without saying. In my opinion, your dev environment should come as close as possible, while fulfilling your needs first (I prefer to keep the dev environment as self-sustaining as possible, in case I am disconnected from the network).
I have no problem using the dev server for development, and IIS (locally or remote, as the case may be) for testing - but it depends on the project requirements too. I prefer to host web services on the local IIS server, for example. YMMV.
We develop on laptops using virtual machines. This way, if the virtual OS crashes (or the host OS, for that matter) you just copy your vpc back over from the network (where we have backups) and you are good to go. also, it makes it WAY easier to run a "standard" development platform wich is as close to production as possible.
For us, we HAVE to have IIS installed, as we are developing Sharepoint '07 webparts.
Currently our dev team set up all the websites they're working on in IIS on their local machine. We're thinking of switching to using the built in ASP.NET development server instead.
Is this a good idea? What are the pros / cons of using the ASP.NET dev Server? Are there any gotchas we should be aware of?
Thanks.
NB: Running on Win XP / IIS 5 / VS2005
Edit:
Didn't realise it was called Cassini.. More answers for Cassini v IIS here.
There is nothing that the ASP.NET Dev WebService can do that IIS can't (You can set breakpoints etc, just attach the VS debugger to the ASP.NET runtime).
However, the ASP.NET Dev WebService does not represent a true production environment, and as such you can get caught by gotchas that you wouldn't expect when you deploy to production.
Because of that, I mandate that all development is done using IIS on a local machine. It doesn't take much work to configure a site in IIS.
It's a very good idea. Here are some reasons for:
You no longer need admin access to your machine for web development (it can still be helpful).
It's much easier to test a quick change and continue work, and faster iteration cycles are good.
It can simplify setup and deployment of your development environments.
The XP version of IIS has limitation that are not present in the Server version that Cassini side-steps.
The only argument I know against is that there are a couple very rare edge cases where the Cassini built-in server doesn't exactly mimic IIS because you're using odd port numbers. I doubt you'll ever run into them, and using Cassini as the primary dev environment does not preclude developers from also having access to IIS on the machine. In fact, my preferred setup is Cassini first for most small work, then deploy to my local IIS for more in-depth testing before moving code back to the shared source repository.
[Edit]
Forgot about url re-writing. You do need IIS for that. And an example of a limitation of the built-in XP IIS is that you are limited to one site in XP (can have multiple applications, but that's a different thing).
I had to switch (back) to IIS for one project, because I needed to set some virtual directories which is not possible on the ASP.NET Development Web Server.
As I stated here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/103785/what-are-the-disadvantages-of-using-cassini-instead-of-iis your developers need to be aware that Cassini runs as the local user, which is typically an admin account for developers. The development will be able to access any file or resource that their account can, which is quite different from what they will see on an IIS 6 server.
The other thing that's a pretty big gotcha is debugging web services is much easier using IIS and vdirs rather than separate Cassini instances.
I know at one point I had an issue with Authentication not working as expected on Cassini (built in development server)
Also, if you need to test things like ISAPI plugins (a re-writer for example) I'm not sure how that's done on Cassini.
The constantly changing port is also rather disconcerting to me. Also, for each web project in your solution it fires up another instance of a Casini server, and each one takes anywhere from 20 to 50 MB of memory.
I use IIS all the time, it's pretty easy to setup, and you guys are already doing that...
I've used both methods and I prefer having IIS locally vs. using the built-in server. At very least you're more consistent with the final deployment setup.
Also, when using IIS 5.1, be sure to get JetStat IIS Admin, it adds functionality that is disabled out of the box on IIS 5, such as being able to setup multiple sites.
I have run into the following limitations with the asp.net dev server:
does not support virtual dirs. If you need them in your app, IIS seems to be your only choice
Classic asp pages dont run in dev server. So if you have a mixed web app (like I have at my client right now), IIS seems to be the solution
If you need an admin UI to configure settings, IIS works better
Of course IIS requires that you be a local admin.
Another distinction I noticed is that Cassini runs as a 32-bit process and you have no control over it, whereas you can control the application pool of your IIS app to disallow 32-bit (assuming your IIS is running on a 64-bit server). This becomes especially important if your web application is going to call APIs in 64-bit processes such as SharePoint Foundation/Server 2010. When you debug your web app with Cassini as your debug server, you'll get "The Web application at url could not be found. Verify that you have typed the URL correctly" type errors when instantiating objects. If you debug using IIS with the app running in an app pool that runs as 64-bit with an identity that allows access to sharepoint database then you'll be able to debug properly.
In VS12 the development server is way slow, takes a few seconds to download a 2kbyte file. This did not happen in vs10. When you have a bunch of jquery files and css this is a real problem. Also every page requeries all the css/js files. Very very slow regression testing.
The main issue I've run into with the dev server is SerializationExceptions with custom security principals stored on the thread context. Details here.