So on friday Windows Vista was available for download at MSDN. Actually, it was available thursday night, so I got lucky and downloaded it before the big rush I guess.

After I got the download in, I burned it to DVD and started installing it on my laptop. Now, I use this laptop for work. I develop webapplications and webservices for both .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0 on it. So I need both Visual Studio 2003 and Visual Studio 2005 working. Can you see where this is going?

The first hurdle I encountered was the vast difference in the interface. I wanted to install IIS, but it took me a while before I found it. In hindsight it’s pretty logical, but I was thinking too much in Windows XP. Windows Vista comes with IIS7, which is different then IIS6 or IIS5 (both of which look remarkebly the same from the management interface point of view). I spend some time looking at the options, then added a webapplication and worked to get it running correctly. As with IIS6 I had some trouble getting all the security setup correctly. Then I spend a lot of time getting it to run on ASP.NET 1.1. Apparently, by default, it runs on ASP.NET 2.0 and even an ASP.NET 1.1 application will, in fact, be run on ASP.NET 2.0. There is some sort of backwards-compatibilty in there to make it work. But I really wanted it to work in ASP.NET 1.1. So I had a lot of tweaking to do, but after a few hours of Googling, trying and cursing, I was able to make it work.

What you have to do is install .NET 1.1, then add the ASP.NET .1. ISAPI filter DLL to the “ISAPI and CGI restrictions” part of the configuration and set it to ‘allow’. Then select the ASP.NET 1.1 Application pool and your done. In my case I also needed to comment out some stuff in the globalk web.config and the local web.config. I’ll see how I can make it run with both ASP.NET 1.1 and ASP.NET 2.0 later, when I fix my remaining problems.

So, the website was working. Not to get Visual Studio 2003 up and running.
The thing is, it’s not supported. That’s right. Microsoft puts great pride in their ‘backwards compatibilty’ layers, some of which stop Windows from utilizing it’s full potential, but they won’t make VS2003 work on their new OS. By the way, do wanna now what old development enviroment did they spend time on? Visual Basic 6.
That’s no joke. Apparently the reason is that migrating from .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0 is easier then VB6 to something else. And in that they are correct, however that doesn’t help me a s developer at all! If operations won’t install .NET 2.0 on the production machines, then I can’t update the codebase. So I’ll need to run VS2003.
To make things even more interesting, even VS2005 isn’t fully supported(!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) Even after you install servicepack 1 (which is currently in beta) there will still be ‘issues’.
So let me get this straight….even though Vista was in development for over 5 years, they can’t make an application they released last year compatible? And here I thought Steve Balmer thought developers where so important.

Currently I can’t get VS2003 to open a web project. It’s complains that the source directory does not match the IIS share. And from what I read on the internet, this isn’t even supposed to be the problem. The real problem is related to debugging.

It’s really simple. If I can’t get VS2003 to work with Vista, I can’t upgrade and I’ll go back to Windows 2003 Server. Then only after we upgraded all .NET 1.1 applications to .NET 2.0 and Microsoft got their act together to get VS2005 working perfectly on Vista, can I upgrade to Vista. And this goes for my home machine too. Sure I play games on it, but I also develop some stuff as a hobby. If I can’t run VS2005, I’m not upgrading anytime soon. Shiny aero glass windows or not.

[Last played: Testament - The Haunting]