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Download Microsoft Network Installer Beta from FileForum now.

There are dozens of little utensils and navy you need to download from Microsoft in order to actually start developing Network applications on your own. Finally, the business has decided to make them all available through a single form.

For over two being now, one of the most frequent desires heard at Network increase conferences -- especially Microsoft s annual MIX in Las Vegas -- is for the business to create an easier, one-stop supermarket for the giving out of the basic workings one requirements to start developing Network pages using Microsoft-supported technologies. Late in September, the business took its first stepladder in that bearing by deploying a simple installer that pre-selects the myriad of utensils and navy necessary for a big shot to start shop ASP.NET, classic Active Attendant Pages IIS , or even PHP applications in and for Windows.

In the awareness of moving developers forward, the installer only workings in Windows Vista, although the substance it makes available aren t necessarily restricted to Vista. In BetaNews tests, we were only able to get the installer to employment on a physical Landscape SP1-based fabrication system, after several failed attempts with a similar virtual machine. Since this is only an installer, we re not certain what true barriers there may be to installing these workings other than artificial ones -- certainly PHP pre-dates Landscape by several years.

Although the current beta isn t the most intuitive installer we ve ever seen, we found in the Network Attendant stub its most useful attribute Recommendations. Here, you select what nature of increase employment you re trying to do, and the installer strength of character respond by selecting just the navy you need to fulfill the job. Impressively, your choices include PHP as well as Microsoft s ASP and ASP.NET, and that shows the business is simply paying interest to veracity Every Network developer for any genus requirements PHP skills.

If you select PHP Developer, the installer pre-selects CGI, navy for HTTP static content and information bank browsing, HTTP Logging, and the IIS Organization Console. For ASP.NET Developer, the installer swaps CGI for the ASP.NET Scaffold and .NET Extensibility. Metabases and administration consoles are available for IIS 6, but are not pre-selected by evasion -- and that, we feel, is a good thing. Here again, one wonders why the installer has rejection tribulation supporting old Microsoft middleware, though it only runs on Vista.

Why, in the Tackle and Scaffold tab, the installer doesn t pre-select .NET Scaffold 3.5 SP1 when the coordination doesn t have it installed yet, is a mystery. You d think that would be one of the basic elements. Also, there s some selections you d think Microsoft would have included here. Silverlight is one of them -- that s right, it s actually missing. Technically, you don t need it to deploy ASP.NET applications, but I had expected it to have been an option.

Also missing is an access for the business s ASP.NET MVC Mock-up Inspection Director system, which is Microsoft s new system of modeling distributed applications. That s missing on purpose, it turns out, because a fully-assembled public beta has not been readily available. That crisis was solved just last Thursday, with the release of the first beta of a full MVC frame , which requires ASP.NET 3.5.

The download and putting in means is reminiscent of drama manual updates through Microsoft Update; the installer downloads each selected entry manually and installs it. What s different is that some of these processes can run in parallel; for instance, I noticed that the installer was downloading the SQL Attendant Driver for PHP, Windows Installer 4.5 an preference I selected manually , and .NET 3.5 SP1 simultaneously. Stipulation Windows Update were to start working this way, it could save a little time.

The means was not exactly as smooth as silk: for instance, although the install routines for each of the selected workings were supposed to remain silent, the one for the SQL Attendant driver for PHP insisted that I tell it what its evasion putting in information bank should be. Well, I didn t happen to know the answer to that one off-hand, so I just clicked on Cancel. Luckily that didn t cancel everything, and after about 15 minutes, the lot else in the ASP.NET and PHP sets combined was installed and activated -- except for .NET 3.5 SP1, which required a reboot.
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