RSS
A friend of mine is about to extend his company's B2B e-commerce system, enriching it with the capability to manage and process assets that can be collaboratively accessed by multiple users. Having a limited budget in mind, the upcoming Visual Studio LightSwitch might provide a simple way to quickly accomplish this task.
The main challenge are the obsolete OS, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, and the deployment on Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0. Unfortunatelly, this platform is NOT officially supported in LightSwitch Beta 1.
Nevertheless, let us walk through the initial setup and configuration steps.
Installing the OS Prerequisites
Accordingly, preparatory work and setup of several frameworks will be necessary to fulfill the prerequisites for the deployment on a Windows XP / Windows Server 2003 platform.
Deploying Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta1 Applications
After having successfully completed all OS preparations, we proceed with Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta1 setup.
Following the Deployment Guide of Beth Massi we will use the Web Platform Installer 2.0 to accelerate the installation process.
Please note, a conflict persists between the WCF RIA Services package and LightSwitch Beta Server Prerequisites. Both depend on a different version of the Server Express edition R2 which forced me to manually setup SQL Server Express 2008 R2 with Tools, before using the Web Platform Installer.
From Web Platform Installer select the Customize link under Tools and choose Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta Server Prerequisites. This setup should install all the necessary components to deploy a LightSwitch application.
However in my case, an unhandled exception occurred shortly before the setup completed, because the IIS 6.0 was missing a mandatory feature.
The distribution of the LightSwitch application also failed as expected.
First I tried to publish the LightSwitch test application as a 3-tier deployment package and deployed it manually by extracting the zipped contents. This task involved the execution of the generated SQL script, after creating a new database and injecting the database name in the placeholders of the script template. Finally I copied all files to its destination folder and configured the IIS, SQL and folder security settings. Without success, the server presented a blank page and some pointless script errors.
So I join the community and have high hopes for Beta2!
I haven't read about any official release statement, yet. Neither for the final release, nor for the highly anticipated Beta2. Mary Jo-Foley quoted an availabilty blog post that LightSwitch would be a 2011 product and some people guess the Beta2 would be available in 2011 Q1. Unfortunatelly, the cited availability blog post seems to be withdrawn.
Meanwhile, I spend some time reading the LightSwitch team blog and the insights of Ayende Rahien's LightSwitch analyzations.
The main challenge are the obsolete OS, Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, and the deployment on Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0. Unfortunatelly, this platform is NOT officially supported in LightSwitch Beta 1.
Nevertheless, let us walk through the initial setup and configuration steps.
Installing the OS Prerequisites
Accordingly, preparatory work and setup of several frameworks will be necessary to fulfill the prerequisites for the deployment on a Windows XP / Windows Server 2003 platform.
- Ensure Service Pack 2 and all necessary security patches have been installed (yep, no SP3 here)
- Run Windows Update in order to install the optional .NET Framework 3.5 SP1
- Update to Windows Installer 4.5 for new MSI support
- Install Windows Management Framework (incl. PowerShell 2.0, WinRM 2.0), required by SQL Server / SQL Server Express
Deploying Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta1 Applications
After having successfully completed all OS preparations, we proceed with Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta1 setup.
Following the Deployment Guide of Beth Massi we will use the Web Platform Installer 2.0 to accelerate the installation process.
Please note, a conflict persists between the WCF RIA Services package and LightSwitch Beta Server Prerequisites. Both depend on a different version of the Server Express edition R2 which forced me to manually setup SQL Server Express 2008 R2 with Tools, before using the Web Platform Installer.
From Web Platform Installer select the Customize link under Tools and choose Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta Server Prerequisites. This setup should install all the necessary components to deploy a LightSwitch application.
However in my case, an unhandled exception occurred shortly before the setup completed, because the IIS 6.0 was missing a mandatory feature.
The distribution of the LightSwitch application also failed as expected.
First I tried to publish the LightSwitch test application as a 3-tier deployment package and deployed it manually by extracting the zipped contents. This task involved the execution of the generated SQL script, after creating a new database and injecting the database name in the placeholders of the script template. Finally I copied all files to its destination folder and configured the IIS, SQL and folder security settings. Without success, the server presented a blank page and some pointless script errors.
So I join the community and have high hopes for Beta2!
I haven't read about any official release statement, yet. Neither for the final release, nor for the highly anticipated Beta2. Mary Jo-Foley quoted an availabilty blog post that LightSwitch would be a 2011 product and some people guess the Beta2 would be available in 2011 Q1. Unfortunatelly, the cited availability blog post seems to be withdrawn.
Meanwhile, I spend some time reading the LightSwitch team blog and the insights of Ayende Rahien's LightSwitch analyzations.
