Which Operating System would you recommend when working with Visual Studio 2008 and it's asp.net framework? I will only use it for Web-developing and Visual Studio is the only thing I need on it.
I do all my programming on a 2Ghz laptop with 2GB memory. Should I stick with XP? Windows Server 2008/2005 or perhaps Vista? Should I use a 64bit version?
Money is not an issue.
I would choose my desktop OS depending on my server OS, in order to have the same version of IIS. If the server uses 2003, you may choose XP Windows XP x64. If it uses 2008, you should choose Vista.
Even if your server runs 2003 you may choose Vista to learn the new features of IIS 7 and thus be prepared the day you choose to upgrade to 2008.
I really see no reason to run 32 bit, unless you plan to use some component that don't support 64 bit (such as WSE 2.0).
So, Vista 64 bit is probably the best choice or XP Windows XP x64 if you run Windows server 2003 and want to play safe.
Btw, if you like beta software, you may use Windows 7 Beta. I am currently running that in combination with VS2008 and have very few issues.
EDIT: Windows XP 32 Bit is not recommended since it uses IIS 5.1. The 64 bit version uses IIS 6.0 and is therefore the only recommended version of XP.
Furthermore, all the mentioned configurations should work fine with 2 GB of memory (including Vista and 7). However, if you plan to work with very large solutions and several instances of visual studio, memory consuming add-ins such as Resharper or your application in itself will be very memory consuming, an upgrade to 4 GB should be considered.
I have XP and have no reasons to complain.
Aside : "Money is not an issue" - I've always wanted to use this sentence. Not yet.
I use VS2008 on XP with less memory without a problem. It really shouldn't matter mostly just a personal preference.
With only 2GB of memory, I'd recommend going with 32-bit XP.
While you can code on a Windows Server OS, you may find that they are tuned quite differently. For example, Server 2008 shares a lot of code with Vista, but the audio stack has a considerably higher latency than you would want on a desktop OS.
See: Larry Osterman's article Why do people think that a server SKU works well as a general purpose operating system?
I've been doing all my development in Vista x64 lately and have found it to be quite usable. So that would be and is my choice.
If money isn't an object I'd really suggest sticking another 2 gigs of ram in your laptop. It shouldn't be all that expensive and the additional ram is really useful (and absolutely necessary if you're planning on doing anything like running a VM).
I run Visual Studio 2008 on a 2GHz/2GB RAM laptop with Vista Ultimate, all work PCs are 2GB RAM desktops with VS2008/Vista Business - with no issues.
I know this is about a recommended OS, but if you're after getting the best performance from Visual Studio, how about this gem, straight from ScottGu's mouth!
Tip/Trick: Hard Drive Speed and Visual Studio Performance
Scott seems to think having a fast hard-disk will considerably improve hard-disk performance, and I have to agree with him. He also gives some recommendations for memory and CPU.
I would also say that, OS-wise, Windows XP is fine, as is Vista. I run VS2005 & VS2008 on both XP and Vista (both 32-bit) and from the OS perspective, there's really no difference.
I've found 2005 and 2008 to run pretty equally with XP32 and Vista32. There may be some edge cases with Vista, but I have yet to experience them with asp.net.
HOWEVER, the 32/64 question is another one altogether:
Team is Going from XP32 to XP64 for .NET Development - Any Gotchas?
I usually mirror whatever environment things will be used most in. We're pretty XPrific around here, so I've been using VS2008 there.
Related
I'm working on an ASP.NET project in Visual Studio 2010 remotely (over lan) on a very powerful windows server machine. I work for a small non-profit and the previous developer wrote and developed on this machine, so I came in and have been constricted to this setup. Visual Studio seems to run a bit slowly/choppy on this OS. I'm wondering if this is normal and if it is a better practice to develop locally on my Windows 7 machine.
Most developers I know run Visual Studio on their local machine. Everyone's case is different, so there's really no way for us to answer this question without actually being there. So do it, and see what works better for you. No one on SO can answer this for you.
I ran Server 2008 as a desktop OS on my previous machine for about 3 years - 4GB RAM, AMD CPU, had no problems developing with it so I don't think it's the OS per se, unless it's been installed or configured badly.
But no, that's not a normal scenario, it's never a good idea to do all the development on the production machine.
The slowness/choppiness could be a number of things: -
if the machine is being used to host the application you're developing, is the application actually in use while you're developing ? If the server is periodically or regularly under load, this could account for slowness
if the above is true, please tell me the actual ASP.NET website is a copy of the development codebase, and you're not just compiling the site in-place.. as it's being used.. the horror
is the machine doing anything else ? Is SQL Server also running on that machine, is it sending emails, are there some app-related windows services ?
have you tried profiling the application, or at least using PerfMon to see what's going on ?
any driver issues ? have you checked the eventlogs ?
how fast is your internet connection ?
In short it could be a number of things, but the development experience on Server 2008 should be no different from Vista, Win7 or 8.
I am wondering if it is better to develop .Net 2010 web application on XP as compare to Vista? I have developed many .Net applications on XP without any problem and personaly like XP over vista. Now i have started a new job and we are all mainly using Vista Ultimate 32 bit.
Are there any known issues with vista for VS2010 development?
Application will be published on Window Server 2003 or 2008 so my main concern is developing and running application localy.
Also, is Visual Source Safe 6.0 Compatiable with Vista?
You'll have some difficulty since XP is only 32 bit (unless you've got the 64-bit edition which is a little flakey re: drivers).
Also, certain features like XNA Game Studio, Windows Phone 7 development, DirectX 11, etc... just aren't supported on an XP development environment.
You may also hit issues with regards to integrating with the Azure cloud platform as it has some dependencies that don't work fully on XP.
That said, if you're only going for a simple Winforms/Console app/ASP.Net site, you probably won't ever notice the difference
Oh and .Net 4.5 isn't supported on XP
As an aside, please DO NOT USE visual source safe - it's truly awful. It doesn't guarantee consistency, has no concept of branching and merging, doesn't allow multiple users to work on the same files and is generally unreliable (not to mention the fact that it relies on every client playing nicely and a single malicious user can drop the entire data store since it's really just a windows share with some files, not an actual server). See this article: Visual SourceSafe Version Control: Unsafe at any Speed? for more details.
You should use TFS or an open source alternative (I've also played with SVN and used AnkhSVN to integrate into VS - Not perfect but pretty good). If you want to use TFS but don't have the servers/experience to set up a server yourself, There's a (currently free) beta being run by microsoft at tfspreview.com which integrates right into VS 2010 SP1 and later and provides all the same functionality as well as a whole slew of other features like bug/workitem tracking, analytics, etc...
I deploy a asp.net web application to datacenter in usa using windows 2008 64bits and sqlserver express 2008.
if i using mac-os or linux ubuntu or unix or mobile android or iphone or ipad my application works better ... very fast... but if i using windows xp, 7, 2008 this same application performance is bad .. more bad .... it's joke? I using power configuration in pc (4gb ram, dual core).
what's happen ?
Thanks
Douglas
It probably has more to do with the differences between the browsers than anything else. Since you can't really use the exact same browser on all systems, try using a browser that allows you to see a time window of when resources are pulled down and how long they take. I know Chrome has built in tools for this, and I'm sure Firefox does as well.
I am about to upgrade my pc, and operating system at the same time. I was wondering what version of Windows 7 to get pre-installed, given that I want to do some ASP.NET development using Visual Studio.
Specifically :
Will all versions of Windows 7 run an IIS server & be suitable for ASP.NET development ?
Are all good for running SQL Server etc ?
Will Windows 7 have any probs running old versions of Visual Studio (Ie. 2003 & 2005 versions).
Are there any other things I need to consider ?
I'm probably going for the 32 bit version of Windows 7.
Thanks in advance,
Bazza
I would suggest you get the 64-bit version: there's really no reason to be running a 32-bit operating system in this day and age (unless you have some esoteric hardware that doesn't have 64-bit drivers, but that's exeedingly rare: especially on Windows 7).
I think IIS 7.5 is included in Home Premium, but I think the Professional SKU is probably the best bang-for-buck version. You don't actually need IIS for ASP.NET work anyway, the development server that's included with Visual Studio is usually the best option anyway (it doesn't require Administrator privileges to debug).
Other than that, they'll all run SQL Server fine, and I see no reason why older versions of Visual Studio won't run, either (there may be issues with UAC, but nothing too dramatic for day-to-day use).
Are there any issues with running an asp.net 1.1 application under windows server 2008 64-bit web edition?
I have never tried it myself, but I did find the following pages that you might find interesting:
This blog has an in depth walk through of configuring ASP.NET 1.1 on Windows Server 2008. The author does not say if it is x86 or x64, so I would just assume its x86. But either way, it looks like the author had to jump through some hoops to get the ISAPI filter setup correctly.
I also found this thread on the IIS7 forums where someone discuses having poor performance from ASP.NET 1.1. on x64 Win2k8. So from poor performance I would assume it worked to some extent. Unfortunately towards the end of the thread the author mentions encounter 500 errors, and then the discuss stops :-(
So from what I've read I would guess that its possible, but I would also guess that you would have less hassle if you could find some alternative that didn't involve both II7 and x64.
I have recently been testing our application on 64 bit 2008. Our application is .net framework 3.5 but we had a few problems.
The main issue we had was with 3rd party components such as Aspose words which were not built for 64 bit and caused an error. Unfortunatly you wont know without trying it..
.NET 1.1 is 32 bit only hence the app pool would have to run as 32 bit and use the classic pipeline. I haven't tried myself and I would do all that I can to not have to install .NET 1.1 on a 2008 server but it should work.
No problem. Just follow intructions on
http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/472/how-to-install-aspnet-11-with-iis7-on-vista-and-windows-2008/
The option "CGI Restrictions" (last step) is found on IIS7 admin by clicking on the machine name.
I'm pretty sure that the article at http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/472/how-to-install-aspnet-11-with-iis7-on-vista-and-windows-2008/ is for NON-R2 versions of Windows Server.
As far as I know ASP.NET 1.1 cannot run (or at least, not run well) on Windows.
There are some band-aid solutions around that various people have posted / blogged but this isn't supported by Microsoft.