Microsoft Development

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There are times that I am happy with the way that microsoft are doing things. Then there are times that I feel like pulling my hair out. This is one of the latter. Frequent readers will know that I am writing a web-services application.

Now, this should be fairly simple. I have a number of seperate components, and want to debug an application. Now, WebServices application MUST be run in a VirtualDirectory under IIS as far as I can tell. This would not be too bad. So I simply made c:My ProgrammingVB.Net simply pointed to by http://localhost/local. This should make developing WebServices applications relatively easy.

But, This does not really work, at least not with the applications I am working with. I have not quite worked it out.

MSDE

One of the other issues in getting this application ready for use is to get the packaging done, and done so that it is cheap to use. This means using MSDE rather than SQLserver. This itself is not an issue. The administration of the MSDE is. There are some issues in the form of marketing from Microsoft. This means that Microsoft does not provide a GUI to administer the database.

Well, that is not entirely correct. They do provode a GUI. But one that you install as part of IIS, to a directory that they dont tell you about. So I have not been able to work out where it is installed to yet. Oh, and you are not permitted to re-distribute this application. Users must basically download it from microsoft if they want to use it.

OK. So ASPEnterpriseManager looks really good. User Interface is there. But it has not been worked on for about 12 months even though it is a SourceForge project. Again it needs to be at the root level of IIS. And just to make things simple databases are created in Access format, not MSDE/SQLserver format. Oh, well. Next try.

The last of the options is MSDE.Biz which I have spoken about before. I can redistribute this provided I supply copyright messages and the like. Suits me. It will add about $US20 to the cost of the application, but that is not much really. It will add some paperwork. But I dont think there is any option. C’est La Vie.