Connecting to IIS 7.0 websites from Visual Studio (2005/2008)
Yeterday I installed Windows Server 2008 Standard onto my "web/file/print/email/media server" at home. Installation went super smooth, configuration was quite intuitive. After I installed all components and the basic configurations were done I tried to setup some of my websites. The problems I experienced doing so:
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By default, ASP.Net sites can not be visited "Anonymously". You'll have to define users for each .Net enabled website before they are shown to your anonymous visitors. Error pages are improved BTW, looks a lot nicer if you ask me.
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Connecting to my sites using Visual Studio Team Suite 2005 from my regular workstation does not work. On Server 2003 I simply enabled Frontpage Server Extensions 2002 (FPSE) for each website, which was enough to connect to it from Visual Studio directly. Now in Server 2008 that's different. I did not do much with IIS 7 in Vista, so I am not used to the new IIS yet. I tried searching for FPSE there but without success. Then I found some answers using Google: FPSE is no longer supported! So how can I then connect to my sites directly from another location using Visual Studio!? There seems to be
a strange unsupported fix for it, which I did not yet manage to get working on my server. I did get the Administration pages visible after installation, which state FPSE are indeed extended, but I did not yet manage to connect from Visual Studio. I will try some more later this week and will add any updates on this blog-post
2008/02/16 21:54 - As promised, here is an update regarding connecting to my Windows Server 2008 webserver, running IIS 7.0 and FPSE 2002 (as linked above). I just installed Active Directory Domain Services and DNS Server (because I will also be hosting MS Exchange on that machine), rebooted and voila! Connecting from my workstation (VS 2005) to my websites on Server 2008 magically works again! So either adding DNS or AD fixed my problem!