System Upgrade - ASP.Net

System Upgrade - ASP.Net
March 13, 2003

Microsoft's new way to "save the world" - ASP.Net

Just install ASP.Net and everything will be better.

ASP.Net is an IIS pulg-in (extension). You just need to go to the Microsoft web site and download it for free.

What to Install

Problem 1 - How do you get ASP.Net

"ASP.NET for Dummies" suggest using www.asp.net to download ASP.Net. Click download and there were 2 options

.NET Framework Redistributable (21 MB): "ASP.NET and the .NET Framework ... everything necessary to build and deploy ASP.NET applications"
.NET Framework Software Development Kit (131 MB): "includes everything in the Redistributable, plus" a bunch of stuff

Both links took me to the .NET Framework Downloads page which provided several options. I chose

Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 Software Development Kit Final Beta
Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 Redistributable Final Beta

According to the fine print, you must manually install the Framework Redistributable before installing the Beta SDK. (Bascially, the instructions are not particularly clear.)

Obviously, one of the reasons for pushing the dotNet technology is to force everyone to upgrade their systems. Windows 95, 98, and NT4 are reasonably stable operating systems. (At any rate, the new ones aren't any better.) As a result, most people have no reason to upgrade to Windows 2000 or Windows XP.

However, by convincing application developers to only use dotNet technology, and by not making dotNet available on Windows 95, people MUST upgrade their operating systems (and this usually means buying a new faster machine) just to buy a new program.

However, I want ASP.Net and that requires XP Professional, 2000, or .Net Server.

Windows 95 is not supported by the dotNet framework.
Windows 98, NT4, and XP Home can not run ASP.Net.

Installation

It was actually very easy, just run dotnetfx.exe. Several new directories were added

c:\Inetpub\wwwroot\aspnet_client: Only 3 files
C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET - 35.6 MB
C:\WINDOWS\Registration - 1.07 MB
C:\WINDOWS\assembly - 26.9 MB: There are many files and directories in this (92 files, 93 folders) ... but you can't see them using Windows Explorer.

Only 4 registry keys were changed - Explorer Cache amd AppData folders were changed from the Windows directory to the user's profile directory.

At this point, ASP.Net works.

Epilog


94.8 GB free after install of framework
18,381,778,944 bytes used

94.2 GB free after install of sdk
18,681,692,160 bytes used

Apparently, the samples are written in Visual J# (whatever that is)
So I'll also have to install "Visual J# .NET Redistributable Package 1.1"
available from msdn.microsoft.com/vjsharp

Timeline

Don't get me wrong, dotNet is a significant step forward verses writing code in VisualBasic or Visual C++ with MFC. In fact, it brings those languages up to the level of Delphi - except the Delphi programs work on all the Windows operating systems and dotNet programs require that you buy a new computer.

Author: Robert Clemenzi - clemenzi@cpcug.org