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ASP for windows - how to activate?!!

W

whutadilly

New Member
i'm sick of html sites and i want to learn ASP or PHP scripts. I use windows xp so ASP is the only option for me ;) i wanna ask help from you guys.. how to activate the ASP in windows? i have xp cd. plz give me guides. thank you so much.
 
Running Windows doesn't necessarily mean you'll have to go with ASP(.NET).
Your first decision to make should be whether you're going to go with free or paid hosting. If you only want free hosting and you have to start learning ASP(.NET) anyway I'd suggest learning PHP instead since there's only a limited number of free hosts offering ASP.
If you're going to go with a paid host, the next step is deciding your budget. If money is a great concern for you, PHP hosting will be cheaper than Linux hosting.

Apache should run fine on Windows btw, or PHP should integrate with IIS as well.
As far as ASP is concerned, I'd suggest looking into ASP.NET instead. Your options there are to go with IIS that comes with XP Pro (not XP Home) or the free WebMatrix project comes with an ASP.NET server to test out your site as well.
 
Why not download something like phpDEV (just google for it - it's a soundforge hosted project by firepages) it'll install a platform with Apache, php & MySQL which works a treat. I have it running on just about every windows version including 2003 server without errors or problems.

For ASP or .NET you'll need IIS (there are perl versions of ASP interpreters but not as good as native support) preferably version 6 running, and the old ASP and new .NET are different. The .NET stuff will cost you dearly.

Take it all into account but really start with php and something like phpDev or phpTriad.
 
Decker said:
For ASP or .NET you'll need IIS (there are perl versions of ASP interpreters but not as good as native support) preferably version 6 running, and the old ASP and new .NET are different. The .NET stuff will cost you dearly.
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I'm assuming that all he wants to do is test his site locally before putting it online.

In either case: ASP.NET won't cost you a cent.

.NET framework runtime v1.1 + .NET v1.1 SDK (documentation, samples, etc)
development IDE: The WebMatrix project or Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition (part of the Visual Studio.NET family - currently in beta. Not sure it if is free after the final release)
Web server: IIS 5 (comes with XP Pro) will run .NET, WebMatrix also features a builtin webserver for testing purposes
database server: SQL server 2000 Desktop Engine or SQL Server 2005 Express Edition (current in beta, final version will be available free of charge still)

To be fair: Zend Studio is an IDE for PHP and has a free limited feature license available for it.

And just for the record: a full version of Zend Studio will set you back $250, a Visual Studio.NET Standard license can be had for $100.
SQL Server comes with a full GUI and is superior to mySQL which has a command line and rather poor documentation. Free, decent mySQL GUIs don't exist and SQLyog which is my personal favourite is priced at $49 for a license.

Do the math and see how "free" PHP really is. :shame:
 
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Hi CB, yep same thing but it's not just runtime libs (MS is very strict on usage - surprise)

I'd get into the .net framework and Zend with you but - snooze php has kicked in :D
 
CareBear said:
I'm assuming that all he wants to do is test his site locally before putting it online.

In either case: ASP.NET won't cost you a cent.

.NET framework runtime v1.1 + .NET v1.1 SDK (documentation, samples, etc)
development IDE: The WebMatrix project or Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition (part of the Visual Studio.NET family - currently in beta. Not sure it if is free after the final release)
Web server: IIS 5 (comes with XP Pro) will run .NET, WebMatrix also features a builtin webserver for testing purposes
database server: SQL server 2000 Desktop Engine or SQL Server 2005 Express Edition (current in beta, final version will be available free of charge still)

To be fair: Zend Studio is an IDE for PHP and has a free limited feature license available for it.

And just for the record: a full version of Zend Studio will set you back $250, a Visual Studio.NET Standard license can be had for $100.
SQL Server comes with a full GUI and is superior to mySQL which has a command line and rather poor documentation. Free, decent mySQL GUIs don't exist and SQLyog which is my personal favourite is priced at $49 for a license.

Do the math and see how "free" PHP really is. :shame:
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Nobody is forcing you to expensive software. Your pretty crazy to spend $250 on some crappy editor.
You can get phpMyAdmin for mysql for free, and there plenty of PHP editor that are free. My favourite being vim (http://www.vim.org)
 
GregT said:
Nobody is forcing you to expensive software. Your pretty crazy to spend $250 on some crappy editor.
You can get phpMyAdmin for mysql for free, and there plenty of PHP editor that are free. My favourite being vim (http://www.vim.org)
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How am I supposed to debug and step through PHP code without an IDE that features a debugger? :confused4
If you're a normal developper and use Visual Studio.NET on a daily basis, coding PHP feels like you're thrown back into the stone age (even with a full Zend Studio license). It's hard to explain to someone who hasn't used both extensively. The best - still very crude - analogy I can make is writing a novel with nothing more than a pen and paper for tools. It's possible, but it's painstakingly slow going and there's no such thing available to you as on-the-fly grammar and spell checking and all the other quirks that come with a modern word processor.
Or making webpages solely in Notepad vs making them in a visual tool like Dreamweaver. I still type the actual HTML in Dreamweaver like I would in notepad, but I get far more productivity and ease of use out of Dreamweaver.

There's nothing wrong with phpMyAdmin, I do use it for an already deployed site where only casual browsing/maintance on the databases are needed but it's rather crude and slow to use and requires a whole lot more typing than SQLyog does. I also never managed to get phpMyAdmin to work properly with InnoDB's relational databases (inserting, adding, deleting foreign key restrictions for example) which is rather crucial to me.

I'm not trying to bash PHP/mySQL here, they're both more than adequate for what they were designed to be. It's just the fact that neither comes with a decent set of tools for development or proper documentation.
 
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PHP has some of the best documentation I've seen.
I'm not a PHP programmer, so there might be a debugger built-in like perl and python. I just don't where it's at.
 
GregT said:
PHP has some of the best documentation I've seen.
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Have you ever looked through the MSDN library? :confused4
The PHP documentation is horrific to search through since it's either one big HTML file, or one file for every different function. (And I know about the chm version, but it hasn't been updated for over a year which makes it rather useless IMO)
The fact that dozens of sites all have a cached copy of the PHP documentation has also severely polluted any Google searches.
Each entry of a function will have a different inconsistent compostition. One has the parameters and error values at the top, another has it intermixed with all the text, or another says nothing about it at all, leaving you to guess.
 
I've looked through it, and personal I don't like it. It maybe nice and organized to you, but not me.

I don't program in PHP. But when I helping somebody with a script, the PHP.net manual has never failed me. Personally I perfer perldoc over all of them.
 
The MSDN library is a nightmare - you know the keywords and nothing your looking for appears. It's just a basic reference guide at a premium cost. With a premium cost again for anything else, even with partners, where are the good developement oppertunities there??
 
The MSDN library is a nightmare - you know the keywords and nothing your looking for appears.
Click to expand...
Simple example: how to write to a text file?
PHP.net: ironically, the first match is how to read from a file. fwrite only appears in 4th place and none of the other matches are actually at all relevant to the query (and where's file_put_contents()? Writing text to a file is what that function is all about even if it's PHP 5 only)
MSDN: first match is what we need, the rest is also still relevant to our query.

This isn't strictly PHP.net's fault, but due to the fact that they use google to handle searches.
Also, you could query the .NET documentation offline, which isn't possible with PHP (at least not with documentation that isn't outdated by a year).

Decker said:
It's just a basic reference guide at a premium cost.
Click to expand...
Where on http://msdn.microsoft.com/library does it ask you to pay for accessing it online? :confused4
Since we were talking about .NET here, the offline MSDN documentation comes with the .NET SDK.
The Windows API documentation comes with the Platform SDK download, the DirectX documentation comes with the DirectX SDK download, and so on.

The advantage of having the full MSDN library is that it comes with everything all bundled into one, together with a large number of articles, periodicals, books and the KB. But it's not strictly necessary, and still fully available at no charge online.
 
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