James Skemp's StrivingLife

While I've already read Beginning ASP.NET 3.5 by Imar Spaanjaars and moved rather far beyond it, when I had the opportunity to recieve his new book on ASP.NET 4 for review, I took it.

Would I still feel strongly about recommending his work as *the* #1 choice for those new (or relatively new) to ASP.NET? Would it offer enough new content over the previous iteration that I'd recommend a new purchase if someone had the first?

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First, if you're just getting started with ASP.NET, this is once again *the* book to start with. The way the book reads makes it extremely easy to keep up with where he's at, and why. At the end you'll end up with a functional site, having built it yourself, using a good deal of ASP.NET functionality.

The book also assumes little experience with HTML and CSS, which makes this book a fairly good start for anyone who wants to get started with creating Web sites (using ASP.NET), even going into the developer tool Visual Web Developer 2010.

The book itself is a *vast* improvement over previous iterations, with a much more solid wrap and softer (but still thick) pages. (Although the pages must be somewhat thinner, since the previous iteration of this book is about the same depth as this one, even though this has ~70 more pages.)

The guitar on the cover has left me guessing a bit, all the way from 'rock star' to 'hero' to 'he creates a music-related site' but if you don't get stuck on such things, you'll be fine.

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If you've purchased and read the previous iteration of this book, Beginning ASP.NET 3.5, you might be wondering if it makes sense to pick this up.

The only new chapter is one on jQuery (although Microsoft AJAX is still covered and used as before), and it's primarily an introduction, which fits within the context of this book. Crawling the jQuery site for a little while will probably get you up to speed just as well. Otherwise, the rest has been updated to ASP.NET 4 and the current versions of software; little else has changed.

If you picked up the previous iteration and couldn't get through it, then don't bother with this, as it's quite similar. Likewise for if you've moved beyond Beginning ASP.NET 3.5, and feel comfortable with the technology; ASP.NET 4 isn't dug into so much here that you can't get the information elsewhere with some basic searching.

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To conclude, Beginning ASP.NET 4 in C# and VB is *the* book I *highly* recommend to get started with ASP.NET (3.5 or 4). Imar knows the technology as well as how to teach it, from beginning to Web site created. 5 of 5 stars.

For various reasons, I had need to install Windows XP on a new virtual machine earlier today (with Windows 7 64-bit as the host).

For whatever reason, when getting to the point of accepting the licensing terms, before installation, I was unable to use the F8 key. After searching about, I found a number of Mac and Ubuntu users with the same issue, but no Windows users. The left control, shift, alt, and even right control (which I knew wasn't going to work, but an Ubuntu user swore by it and I was out of options) buttons did nothing to help.

However, the often-used (ah, sarcasm) "F Lock" key was what finally did it.

But what the heck if the F Lock key in the first place? Turns out it's a Microsoft keyboard key, and which seems utterly useless.

Did the presence of this key cause the issue? Or is this a common issue that Windows users don't report? Or were the Mac/Linux questions so plentiful that they bumped the Windows users?

The following goes through the steps needed to setup Windows Server 2003, with Web server capabilities (IIS 6 in this instance), on a Sun VirtualBox virtual machine.

Why Windows Server 2003 when Server 2008 is out and available? Because a large number of hosts (mine included) haven't made the switch yet.

Requirements

1. Sun VirtualBox. We want this in particular for the great networking functionality, but other apps, like Microsoft Virtual PC, will work fine as well. I used version 3.0.8 r53138 on Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit for this guide.
2. A copy of Windows Server 2003. In my case, I picked up a copy of Visual Studio 2008 Professional with MSDN Professional, which gives access to a large number of Windows Operating Systems and tools. Microsoft offers a number of subscription options.
3. A computer that with a good amount of RAM and processor. The machine I used for this guide has 4 GB of RAM and a 2.20 GHz processor.

VirtualBox setup

1. Install VirtualBox, making sure that you install any network adapters VirtualBox may need.
2. Create a new virtual machine.
   1. Give the virtual machine a good name, such as Windows Server 2003 - Web Server 1.
   2. Select Microsoft Windows - Windows 2003 as the operating system and version.
   3. Feel free to bump up the base memory size, but if looking to mimic an external server, try to use it's specs. I typically stick to the default of 256 MB.
   4. Create a new hard disk, of the type Dynamically expanding storage; this allows you to create a large disk, but only have it take up the space it needs.
   5. Give the disk a good amount of space; I generally change from the default of 20 GB to 50 GB, since it's not easy to increase this later, but you'll typically never go above 10 GB anyway.
3. Change the Network Adapter from the default of NAT to Bridged Adapter. This will allow you to reach both the Internet and your internal network.
4. With the machine setup, you'll want to verify that your Windows Server 2003 installation media is available. If using MSDN, that means adding your downloaded ISO to the Virtual Media Manager (FIle > Virtual Media Manager) under CD/DVD Images.
5. Start the machine, attaching the ISO when prompted.
   1. Generally the defaults are acceptable.

General Windows Server 2003 setup

1. Once Windows Server 2003 is installed, install the guest additions (Devices > Install Guest Additions); it'll save you a deal of time.
2. Update Windows Server 2003 as needed.
   1. In particular, I like to download the current version of ASP.NET and install IE 8 (although I do the latter as a separate update; I've had issues otherwise).
3. At this point I like to exit out of the machine and clone the hard drive. I'll have activated the license and have a nice hard drive, with the current updates. If I want to create another Window Server 2003 instance, it's easier to just use a base drive and customize as needed. Your decision. (The VirtualBox (VBoxManage) command is clonehd.)

Specific Windows Server 2003 setups

With a base install ready, we can go in various ways with our installation. By default, almost no services will be up and running.

In this particular instance, we just want to run IIS 6.

1. Make sure you're in the Manage Your Server application. See this.
   1. By default it will start automatically (a good thing) or you can find it at Start > All Programs > Administrative Tools > Manage Your Server.
2. From the options, select Add or remove a role.
3. We want a Custom configuration, since we just want a Web server.
4. For our needs, we want our server to be an Application server (IIS, ASP.NET).
5. We only want to enable ASP.NET, not FrontPage Server Extensions (unless you particularly know you want that).
6. Our summary reads something like the following. See this.
   1. Install Internet Information Services (IIS)
   2. Enable COM+ for remote transactions
   3. Enable Microsoft Distrubuted Transaction Coordinator (DTC) for remote access
   4. Enable ASP.NET
7. You may be prompted to insert a CD, at which point you'll want to mount CD 1 of the R2 discs, and not CD 2. You can play around with this as needed.
8. Shortly, you see that "This server is Now an Application server." Included on this page is a link to view additional steps to secure the server. See this.
9. You should now see that the Application Server role is now available to be managed. See this.
10. Opening a browser and calling http://localhost/ should now display the standard Under Construction page.
11. Go to Windows Update and install any needed updates.
12. Assuming you've setup a Bridged Adapter in Network for the virtual machine, you should now be able to browse to the virtual instance in your host machine. You can use both the IP as well as the server name. For example, http://james-wins03ws1/ or http://192.168.1.106/.
    1. This can be found by opening a command prompt (cmd) and running ipconfig /all and finding the IP Address.

Conclusion

At this point you've successfully setup IIS running on Windows Server 2003, in a virtual machine, and are able to connect to it from your host machine.

You can now mimic a real machine as much as you'd like, for example by setting up FTP (FileZilla Server) to move files between the machines.

Questions, comments, and suggestions are appreciated.