Is it possible to host an asp page on a linux server ?
In principle, YES, there are implementations of ASP which will run under Linux.
In practice, NO, your ASP application has probably been written for Windows and will use SQL server (which means you need a Windows box anyway to run that) and probably some COM classes which are unavailable.
But even if you COULD run it, the chances of introducing bugs by moving it to an alien platform is very high.
Also in my experience, the chances of an ASP app having bugs is very high to start with.
checkout ASP.NET mono project
how about this ? or Mono?
Years ago, I've heard of Chili!ASP. I don't know if that's still around anymore.
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My development machine is running Windows XP SP2 (and IIS 5.1 by implication).
Until recently our deployment environment was based around Windows Server 2003 (and therefore IIS 6.0).
We are about to move to Windows Server 2008 (and therefore IIS 7.0) for a new project.
Our projects use ASP.NET MVC and WCF Services.
Are there any key reasons for us to upgrade our development machines to run Windows Server 2008 (or possibly Vista, since this also comes with IIS 7.0)?
I would say it's in your best interest to upgrade your development machines to emulate as much of the production environment as possible within your means and resources. Otherwise you may fall into traps you're completely unaware of just by deploying an application from your development machine to the server's environment, which may pertain to differing versions of IIS, the version of .NET framework each machine is running, or just the way the code is compiled or executed at runtime.
Especially since IIS 7 has been vastly upgraded since IIS 5.1, why shouldn't you work closer with it's current functionality while developing before you missing out on some great opportunities? To really know what to expect from an application in production, develop it under the same circumstances.
Edit/Added: This link may help you see at least one significant example of how differing versions can affect your project.
I would recommend that you develop against the same major build as you intend to deploy on. That said, this leaves you with a few options. First, you could build against your local IIS installation (as it appears you currently do). That means that all of your boxes should likely be upgraded to Windows Vista or Windows 2008 Server (or Windows 7 as it is running IIS 7.5). Your second option is to deploy to a remote machine. It is entirely possible to deploy your application to a remote test machine running IIS 7 and remotely debug as well. The problem is that if you have more than one developer working on the remote site, it becomes problematic. IIS can handle the remote debugging on different webs for different developers, but depending on your architecture and configuration, you may still be sharing resources between instances of test web applications.You could occasionally deadlock each other. The only benefit is that you don't have to buy licenses for all of your machines (and potentially upgrade hardware to support the OS upgrade). However, I think that would be short-sighted. The loss of developer productivity wouldn't be worth it, IMHO.
There are major changes between IIS 5.1 and IIS 7.x. The changes to the architecture, such as the integrated pipeline, can result in drastically different behavior and compatibility issues. I think you will find that IIS 7 far more developer-friendly. The introduction of things such as failed request tracing, extended logging, and enhanced error pages alone make it much easier to track down errors in your application. In that regard, the upgrade is well worth it.
I am considering currently to get a VPS for some of my development test. I found some VPS at a cheap price, which suits me as it's only going to be used as a sandbox.
So far I know it is possible to install .Net 3.5 on the windows 2003 without problems, if I am correct it will be also possible to use IIS6 for all my development including asp.net mvc.
I am looking here if there is anything that would prevent me from using IIS6. I looked on google and apparently the main thing about IIS 7 is the modular design for plugins. This shouldn't be too much of a problem as most of my devs will be for personnal use.
(PHP on IIS will run fine with IIS6)
Our devs are doing all their development against Win2k3 / IIS6 servers with .NET 3.5 and have not encountered any issues that would have been fixed with IIS7. Which is probably good since I've yet to stand up a 2k8 server.
For devs, I think the main thing IIS7 adds is the integrated managed pipeline that allows you to write .NET code for IIS instead of an ISAPI filter.
Shared configs, FastCGI, caching improvements, etc. I think of more as admin features. Useful, but won't really affect your dev time.
IIS7 will provide faster services, but IIS6 should be able to do everything you need (unless you need to run PHP or something of the sort on IIS).
Many of my users have been telling me that they'd like to run my software on their Linux machines under Wine.
But I'm a Windows Developer who has practically no experience with Linux.
Now I could spend a month or two installing Linux, learning Linux, installing Wine, learning Wine, and thoroughly ensure my application runs well under Wine. But I am still developing for Windows, so I don't want to take so much time away from development right now.
So what can I do without too much effort to get my program running as well as possible under Wine?
I did find this General help on running applications under Wine.
Download VMWare and an Ubuntu virtual machine (Ubuntu is a popular Linux distribution) from the VMWare site. This will provide you with a working Linux O/S inside your Windows environment without needing to install Linux manually.
You can then use the instructions here to install Wine, that Wiki page also provides you with some instructions on how to use it.
If you follow what Adam Rosenfield suggested and just try running your application in Wine unmodified, you will be able to determine quickly whether there are problems. My guess would be that there are some, otherwise your users would not have contacted you about it :)
There are many ways for getting help with debugging applications in Wine, consult the website for options and pick a few ways that suit you. As always, it's best not to rely on a single channel for communication.
Also, if you are more comfortable with developing in Windows, the approach of using a virtual machine will allow you to compile your code as usual in Windows and copy the binary into the virtual machine for testing (Ubuntu supports browsing/mounting Windows shares).
As long as you're not doing anything unusual such as playing around with hardware or poking around in undocumented API calls and data structures, you should be able to run your code under Wine with few or no modifications. Wine has a fairly complete implementation of the public Windows APIs, so if your program plays nice and doesn't mess around, it should just work.
Don't use too much of the windows API! Don't use anything new from Microsoft ;)
Avoid using WPF is the #1 suggestion.
But it really wouldn't kill you to test your app under Wine. It's not that hard to try; it certainly won't take months. For instance:
Use http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/downloadmirrors#wubi to install
Ubuntu into a file on your Windows machine, then start ubuntu and install the latest Wine from
http://winehq.org/download/deb
Then try running your app's installer.
If it doesn't work, check the Wine FAQ, ask for help in one of the wine forums, and/or file bugs in wine's bug tracker.
Should take about three hours from a dead start to trying out your installer.
I was rather surprised when one of my Delphi5 applications just worked out of the zip.
The only real way this is going to work is to do it yourself, i.e. install vmware and a linux distro as Sean suggested. Linux isn't actually that hard, and we're all here to help.
Having done a quick test I can confirm that it largely works. There is an ACCVIO reading 0x34 during start up, the error dialog can be ignored and the application runs, I opened the Steve McCarthy GEDCOM.
Screenshot
This was using Wine 1.1.12 under MEPIS 7.9.94-rc1_32 under VMWare. Highly recommend to use VMWare for this sort of thing.
What language/platform do you develop with? Depending on which it is, it should be no trouble to get it running native. For example, if you use Java or Python, both operate very cleanly on Linux. Likewise, if you're a .NET developer, you should be able, with some pain, to get your app running in Mono.
Find Linux beta testers. It can reports a bug to WINE developers or find a bug in your application.
Wine is more sensitive to errors than Windows. For example, Wine will crash on NULL window handles, and fail to create windows if the class is invalid, whereas Windows is more robust and will just circumvent the error.
It's an opportunity to clean up your code.
I was amazed at how well Wine ran my app the first time I tried. However, I had to get rid of a third-party driver-based component.
I'm looking at a new computer which will probably have vista on it. But there are so many editions of vista; are there any weird restrictions on what you can run on the various editions? For instance you couldn't run IIS on Windows ME. Can you still run IIS on the home editions of vista?
Vista Home Basic only has enough IIS features to host WCF services and does not have any of web server features for hosting static files, asp.net, etc.
Here is a link to compare editions. I would recommend going with Home Premium or Ultimate depending on whether the computer will run on a domain.
You can't run Aero on the 'basic' editions, and there are some 'extras' that only run in Ultimate. You probably won't care about those for development, though. The only thing to be careful of would be that it has the same client access restrictions that XP did.
Get Home Premium unless you need to connect to a domain controller (if you don't know what that is, you don't need it).
I know that there are issues with the VFP OLEDB provider on 64 bit machines. ... but what issues do you encounter while actually running a VFP application - on a 64 bit machine? Has anyone had any experience in this area?
My first thought was that it would just run as a 32bit app, without making use of the 64 bit power. However, I ran into difficulties with a FoxPro application connecting to a SQL Server database (probably an OLEDB issue as well). Are there other issues as well?
This is somewhat of a specialized scenario, and it may not be related to 64 bitness, but since you asked...
My organization recently hosted a legacy VFP 7 app on a Windows Server 2008 Enterprise 64 bit server for access over Terminal Services. The app runs fine, but there is some kind of bug with the TS Easy Print technology. When you print from the app to a redirected client printer over Easy Print, the top, left, and bottom sides of each page of the document get clipped. The workaround we use is to have the users print to pdfFactory on the server first, then print from pdfFactory to the redirected client printer over Easy Print. Works great.
This is somewhat of a stab in the dark...but I believe there are some drivers with MDAC that aren't available in x64 windows. I think you may be able to install the normal 32-bit MDAC but it will install to the x86 folder.
We've seen zero problems with our VFP9 apps on 64-bit XP, Server 2003, Vista, or Server 2008.
Our print engine is a VB DLL though, so we wouldn't run into any VFP-specific printing issues.