Using Microsoft’s Free Visual Web Developer to create LAMA ready sites

 

This is part of the LAMA – Best of all worlds tutorial
LAMA Tutorial Home Page

Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2005

Visual Web Developer is a free version of Visual Studio, that just does web projects.  For this tutorial we will be using VWD 2005, because it is .net 2.0 based, and Mono’s 2.0 base is very extensive – so most projects will work ‘out of the box’.

Using VWD along with your LAMA server is a great way to create and host websites for free!

Download from Microsoft’s Website.

http://www.microsoft.com/express/2005/download/default.aspx

Create a sample Asp.Net Project

Partial Class _Default

Inherits System.Web.UI.Page

Protected Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As ObjectByValAs System.EventArgs) HandlesMe.Load

Response.Write(“My LAMA Server is Working!”)

End Sub

End Class

3.) Run the project in VWD.  You should see My LAMA Server is Working!

C# or VB.net & Precompiling the Project

It seems that Mono has extensive support for C#.  So anything you write in C# should compile and run right in Mono.

VB is a different story.  It seems that the VB compiler for Mono is a bit behing the C# counterpart.  There is a way around this though, By pre-compiling your VB.net site.

Visual Web Developer does not include a precompilation tool for it’s web sites, but you can use the DoTheWeb.net Asp.net Precompilation tool. 
This tool is a simple GUI interface for the .net asp.net precompilation command line utility.

Note for VB.net users!!
You must precompile your website project for it to work successfully in your LAMA server. 

Click here to run the DoTheWeb.net Asp.net Precompiler

 

 

Copy your website into your LAMA shared folder

Once you have a simple Asp.net project ready.  Copy it into the asp_net share on your LAMA server.

If you used the DoTheWeb.net precompiler,  you can enter your LAMA server as the destintion path, and your compiled project will be copied right into your LAMA server.

1.) Open your network places and type: \\{your LAMA IP address}
You should see the asp_net folder

2.) Copy your project folder (\testsite) over to the asp_net folder

Now we will have to setup Apache on our LAMA server to see our site.

Next .. Configure Apache for Asp.net Site