While it is completely unsupported by Microsoft, I ran into a few issues dealing with IIS and ASP.NET projects in Visual Studio 2003 along with Visual Studio 2005.  Note that through all of this (and in general) I run with UAC turned off.

First off, it's required that the IIS6 Compatibility Layer be installed otherwise none of this will work.

After installing both VS2003 andd VS2005 (in that order), I was unable to install anything dealing with IIS from the "Programs and Features" control panel.  After several hours of trying various things, I finally found the solution.  I had to uninstall the .NET Framework v1.1, after which I could install any of the IIS options available to me.

I then re-installed .NET Framework v1.1 and ran into the second issue.  Every time I attempted to open an ASP.NET 2.0 project, it would ask me if I wanted to configure the server to use ASP.NET 2.0, even though the application directory was already setup to do so.

As I have purchased every console at launch in the past 15 years on launch day, I picked up my PlayStation 3 on Friday and my Wii on Sunday.  Here are some quick thoughts on both.

Sony had a year to get right what Microsoft screwed up with the 360 at launch.  They fixed none of it, and in fact, made even more mistakes.  The PlayStation Store appears to be bolted on at best.  Want to download a demo that's 800MB?  Great.  Sit there and wait while the entire thing downloads because you can't do anything else.  (Note that the 360 botched this at launch as well, but rectified it.)  Care to interrupt your demo and resume later?  Sure.  Just don't expect the resume portion of that.  Want to buy the game of the demo you purchased?  Ok.  Go back out of the game, over to the store, add it to the cart, check out, and download the entire game again!  At the moment, there is no integrated online gaming like the 360 with Friends lists and the like.  Say what you will about the 360, but it set the bar pretty high when it comes to a tightly-integrated online gaming console.

I have installed a Vista RC1 and Office 2007 Beta 2 on a new partition and am attempting to use it as my primary OS.  So far, so good.  It has come a long way since the first builds I started testing.  There’s certainly more work to be done, but it’s looking more and more like a final product.

On a tangent, symlinks are fantastic.  I know, welcome to UNIX circa 1985.  I am able to symlink my Firefox profile directory, Outlook config and .pst files, and a variety of other things from my XP parition to the Vista parition to share the data easily between the two operating systems.

But, I post to note a few quirks with Visual Studio 2005 and debugging web applications.  By default, I was getting lots of errors about authentication, not being able to debug, and a host of other things.  The fix was quite simple.

1) In the “Internet Options” control panel, go to the Security tab.  Add “http://localhost” to your list of “Trusted Sites”
2) Again, for “Trusted Sites”, clilck the “Custom Level…” button.  Change the value of User Authentication to “Automatic login with current username and password”.
3) In the new IIS manager, ensure that the web application directory is both:
    a) in the “Classic .NET AppPool”.
    b) has “Windows Authentication” enabled in the Authentication section.

Voila.  Debugging without issue on the server.

YMMV, of course.  Note that I’m running with <gasp!> UAC turned off.

I was really, really excited about the XNA Game Studio announcements the other day.  But, the more I learn, the less excited I become.  Read the FAQ for more information…

The basics:  When the first beta of XNA Game Studio Express is released in 2 weeks, it will allow for Windows-only development.  Sometime before the end of the year, we’ll see an updated version that allows Xbox 360 development on retail hardware for those willing to spend $99 to join the “club”.

That sounds really exciting.

But.

In Spring ‘07, we’ll see something known as XNA Game Studio Professional which is targetted at professional game developers to write approved titles using managed code for XBLA or commercial projects on a development Xbox 360.

So.

At the end of the day, after spending $99 to join the “club” that allows development on the 360, you’ll be able to run your own code on the 360, and that’s about it.  There is no distribution model.  You cannot give binaries to other members of the club to run.  The only way to distribute apps with this release will be by giving away all of your source code and and assets and pray that a) they can get it to compile, and b) they don’t steal it.

Microsoft claims that this is a temporary problem and they’ll rectify this by creating the “YouTube of gaming,” where people will be able to upload their work for others to download and play.

And that’s cool.

But the next downer:  there is no network support in the first release of XNA Game Studio, and it appears that the Express version of XNA Game Studio likely won’t have network support for a long time, if ever.

Next:  Anything developed for the 360 using the Express version of XNA Game Studio cannot be sold.

So, to develop a commercial game for distribution on XBLA with XNA, you still have to become an approved developer, drop $10,000 on the development hardware, and then an unknown amount of money on XNA Game Studio Professional.

This basically leaves indie developers exactly where they were before this announcement.

When the “YouTube” thing happens, perhaps it’ll be a bit more exciting because there will be a distribution model, but the lockdown on building commercial applications is just as limiting as the current, approval-only dev model.

Meh.

It’s been a few days.  In that time, I upgraded to Firefox 2 Beta 1.  It also locked up on most starts, requiring me to kill it in Task Manager.  So, I decided to fix the problem since it was obviously not the browser.

I created a new profile, copied my bookmarks, cookies, passwords, etc. over one-by-one, and then manually installed the extensions that I use most.  Since doing that, I haven’t had any odd behavior.  So, there’s obviously something busted with my old profile.  I have no idea what that problem is, but at this point, I’m just happy having a stable version of Firefox.

So how’s IE7?  It’s quite nice, actually.  Speedy, tabbed, and very usable.  It took some convincing to make it work with my favorite desk bar (Dave’s Quick Search Deskbar) due to some security changes, but that was the only hurdle, other than the first install problems mentioned in my last post.

After using them both for the past several days, however, I think I’ve decided to stay with Firefox.  I like extensions.  IE lacks anything like it. Additionally, I find IE’s title/header area too bulky.  I don’t know why I can’t dock the address bar, menu bar, and tab bar/tool bar into just 2 bars in total.  The third bar chews up space for no good reason.

I do like the Quick Tabs preview feature of IE7, but the same feature can be added to Firefox via a browser extension like foXpose.

They’re both on their way to being great new versions.  I would like to see IE7 do something radical to the browser like Firefox, Opera and the rest did in their own way, but I don’t think we’ll be seeing that in this release.