Zooba Chat

Visual Studio 2003 on Vista

Microsoft has kindly removed the need for FrontPage extensions in Vista (or so it thought) and also have said they do not "support" Visual Studio 2003 nice coincidence!! If are a .net 1.1er (web especially) you'll know you need Front Page extensions to open any web based projects (out of the box at least). Therefore Microsoft has kindly screwed you in your path to upgrade!! However I have found a solution (thanks to Fritz Onion).

As you may or may not know a .net site is just a class library with a load of web forms which simply reference methods and classes stored in a compiled dll. So whats the point of all the FrontPage crap ?? (sorry don't have an answer and don't really care). So what the following bullets will explain to do is:

• convert your individual solution to reference the project as a class library
• convert the project file(s) to be a class library rather than a web site
• change the debugger to run a url (so you can still "run" the project)
  
• add the wizards to create web based items to the projects in the gui

So here's my brief step by step from Fritz Onion's guide (easier to read)

• Copy the following file (or its equivilent on your particular set up)
• C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\VC#\CSharpProjectItems\WebProjectItems\webprojectitems.vsdir
• To the following folder
• C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\VC#\CSharpProjectItems\LocalProjectItems
• Do the same for VB, Java, etc if you use these languages
• Delete any .webinfo files from the web project(s) folder(s)
  
• Open any web project(s) .csproj/.vbproj file and change ProjectType attribute to "Local" rather than "Web"
• Create a solution file for the project (in VS) and/or open current solution file in notepad
• If current file:- change the web site reference(s) of the .csproj/.vbproj files to a local file location rather than a http based one
  
• Open the solution file in Visual Studio (if not already open)
• If new file:- add the projects to the solution
• Open the "All Configurations" tab in the project(s) properties and point the OutputPath to the /bin folder of your website for both Debug and Release build types (and any custom ones)
• On the "Configuration Properties/Debugging" tab change the "Debug Mode" from "Project" to "URL" and enter the website URL into the relevant field
• Set the Enable ASP.NET Debugging option to True