A few weeks back, we purchased this pretty sweet new Toshiba laptop. When we purchased it,
I made sure that it had enough horsepower to handle the development things that I would like
to do, and in that regard, it works great. However, the one thing that I settled on was XP Home.
I figured it wouldn't be an issue, but boy was I wrong.
From the onset, nothing but
problems getting my development stuff set up...
Setting up IIS was a total mess.
There's a number of sites that outline the steps necessary to get it running on XP Home,
but I found that
this site
outlined it the best. Biggest problem? You need a
Windows 2000 CD!!
Who has one of those these days?!?! Thank goodness for
MSDN Subscriptions.
My current development setup is a Vault source code server, which I can access both from work and from my home laptop. I was able to get Community Server downloaded, setup, and added to source control from work, but I ran into a number of problems getting it set up and running on the laptop... you guessed it: XP Home!
The working directory for the CS project was set to
My Documents/Visual Studio Projects/CS, and when running the project, IIS kept giving me errors like this:
Server cannot access application directory 'C:\Documents and Settings\Dusty\My Documents\Visual Studio Projects\CS\'. The directory does not exist or is not accessible because of security settings.
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.
A Google search revealed
this post by Dan Bartels, specifically in regards to Community Server.
Points you in the right direction, but doesn't solve the problem. You see, in XP Home, you can't set explicit
permissions on a directory!
Stumbled apon
this article, which happened to mention
that in order to set permissions in XP Home, you need to boot into Safe Mode!
Sure enough, booting into safe mode and giving
Everyone full access to
that folder (the easiest, not the most secure), and I'm up and running!
Moral of
the story: XP Sucks. Maybe these will be the only issues I'll have...