Some Sharepoint and Front Page folks will no doubt be rejoicing over a beta that was quietly released last Tuesday afternoon. Front Page Server Extensions are now available for Vista and Longorn Server. I thought that perhaps this could open the door to developing ASP.NET 1.1 apps on Vista using Visual Studio 2003, so I decided to do a quick test. You see, VS2005 is very versatile as to how it can open webs, but when Visual Studio 2003 opens a web site, it can only use FPSE. And the lack of FPSE is the only thing holding VS2003 back from having full functionality in Vista.
After installing there's no way from the IIS 7 inetmgr to extend a virtual server to use FPSE, so you have two options: FPSE web-based administration, or the command-line tool owsadm.exe. If you have UAC enabled then the command prompt is the only option that works. Run cmd as Administrator, and then run owsadm like this:
Once you get into the right directory the pertinent command line there is:
owsadm -o install -p /LM/W3SVC/1 -u administrator
Note that you have to use a W3SVC type path for the port parameter, and not actually a real port number. Kinda strange, but essential. If you need to find the ID for other webs you've created, just reference that web's Advanced Settings in inetmgr. (Available either from the context menu or in the new "actions" stuff over at the right.)
If you have disabled UAC then you can still do the above, or even easier is to just use the Microsoft Sharepoint Administrator thing found under Administrative Tools, which lets you administer via web pages that are generated from fpadmdll.dll. From there it's easy to extend the Default Web Site so it has FPSE. If it's installed on your machine then just hit this link:
http://localhost:7812/fpadmdll.dll
After installation of FPSE the VS2003 installer still doesn't recognize that both IIS and FPSE is there, and doesn't allow the Web Development component to be installed. Perhaps if an XP system set up with VS2003 were upgraded to Vista, then had FPSE installed, it would work. Another test for another day. Or is anyone out there feeling adventurous? If it works then it means the full VS2003 feature set can run on Vista. Not officially supported of course, but still compatible. So maybe some of the fence-sitters out there still running XP and VS2003 (I still keep a desktop machine configured that way) would now be able to upgrade to Vista.