Setting up an ASP.NET website development environment using Visual Studio .NET, Subversion, and Windows XP

• Preface
• 1.0 Setting up IIS 5.1 on Windows XP
• 2.0 Setting up Visual Studio .NET 2003 for debugging
• 3.0 Installing Apache 2.0 on Windows XP
• 4.0 Installing Subversion on Windows XP
• 5.0 Setting up Apache to recognise Subversion repositories
• 6.0 Setting up TortoiseSVN
• 7.0 Creating Subversion repositories using TortoiseSVN
• 8.0 Setting up for ASP.NET website development on Windows XP
• 9.0 Publishing a website from a Subversion repository

Preface

The aim of this article is to give developers a complete set of steps that will allow them to setup their own isolated development environment for developing websites with ASP.NET, Subversion, and Windows XP.

Microsoft recommends developing ASP.NET web applications in an isolated development environment. For more information on the various kinds of development environments, read the chapter ASP.NET Web Application Development Models from the article Team Development with Visual Studio .NET and Visual SourceSafe.

For developers that already have their environment setup but are not using source control, this article provides simple steps on how to add this functionality to their setup. At the end of each section I have included an Errors section which lists common errors that can occur when performing the proceeding tasks.

The benefits of having a properly setup development environment come in many forms, and once you've used source control and seen how easy it is to setup, you'll wonder how you ever developed without it.

Some of the benefits of source control include:

• Easily scale the number of people working on a project
• Allow secure and efficient external access to projects for contractors and road warriors
• More robust file and project disaster recovery, no need to worry about "where did that file go?"
• Monitoring the quality of code being written, no more "who wrote this" questions need to be asked
• Easier workflow automation to reduce errors moving code between development, staging, and production.

The article covers topics such as:

• How do I setup my machine to be a local/isolated ASP.NET development environment?
• How do I setup source control for internal and external network access?
• How do I publish my website from a Subversion repository to my development server?
• How do I setup my ASP.NET project to have environment specific settings?

The following steps will help you setup Internet Information Server (IIS) on Windows XP. You can read more about Windows XP and IIS here and information on Securing your IIS setup can be found here. This link provides some great information on setting up IIS on Windows XP Home Edition.

One of the benefits of developing ASP.NET websites using Visual Studio .NET 2003 is the power to debug web applications just like you would a desktop application. The Visual Studio .NET 2003 documentation can be found here and there's also a Visual Studio .Net 2003 support area available.

C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\aspnet_regiis.exe -i

<compilation debug="true"/>

Apache is an Open Source webserver, you can find the Apache 2.0 documentation here and a Apache 2.0 FAQ is available here. Download links for Apache 2.0.54 which is used in this tutorial are provided below.

Subversion is an Open Source source control system. Check out this list of great Open Source software, where all the tools are centered around Software management and Engineering. If you know only very little about source control and/or Subversion, read the free book Version Control with Subversion and in particular chapters 1. Introduction, 2. Basic concepts, and 3. Guided Tour before you attempt the rest of this tutorial. If you have the time, read as much as you can so you are familiar with the way Subversion works and what it can do. There's also a Subversion FAQ available aswell.

Now we need to ensure that Subversion and Apache can work together. Setting up Subversion and Apache to work together will make it easy for you to access your source control repositories from outside your network/behind a firewall and where necessary provide a much more simpler means of authenticating users to repositories.

<Location /svn>
    DAV svn
    SVNParentPath C:\svn
    AuthType Basic
    AuthName "Subversion repositories"
    AuthUserFile passwd
    #AuthzSVNAccessFile svnaccessfile
    Require valid-user
</Location>

#LoadModule dav_fs_module modules/mod_dav_fs.so
#LoadModule dav_module modules/mod_dav.so

LoadModule dav_svn_module modules/mod_dav_svn.so
LoadModule authz_svn_module modules/mod_authz_svn.so

TortoiseSVN is one of the free Subversion Windows clients available. RapidSVN is an alternative and cross-platform client that quite a few people use although I haven't used it. The TortoiseSVN documentation can be found here and there's also a TortoiseSVN FAQ available aswell.

Now that you have Subversion setup to store all your website code, you may run into one little problem when developing on Windows XP. Windows XP can only run one website at a time. This can be very tedious when you are developing locally and need to constantly switch between web sites. Having to go into the IIS management console each time is very annoying. The steps below will allow a simple one click process, to switch the web sites home directory.

If all your websites can run within their own virtual directory, then the following setup doesn't apply to you.

You may (and often will) have sites that need to be placed in the root of the website directory in order to work correctly due to them having absolute links and not being .NET controls (style sheets, images etc).

This then presents a problem with running multiple websites on Windows XP. You can only run one website at a time with a true document root. In a future article, I'll show how you can run multiple websites on Windows XP, but for now, there's a way we can simplify switching the root directory of the local website running on your machine.

The following is an example directory structure of how you might check out numerous web sites from Subversion.

c:\websites\site1\
c:\websites\site2\
c:\websites\site3\

Once you have them checked out, to switch the root directory of your website running on your local machine, we are going to use some scripts to add an option to your Windows Explorer.

The steps you would take in switching between projects would be:

• Close Visual Studio (if already open)
• Switch the root to the directory you want to work on (right click-> Set IIS home)
• Open Visual Studio
• Open desired project file or solution

Note: You'll need to close your Visual Studio Solution/Project when switching between IIS home directories, you may receive an error as mentioned in the error section below if the steps above are not followed.

Follow the steps below to create a menu item in Windows Explorer to simplify switching the websites root folder.

# set.iis.path.reg #
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell\Set IIS home\command]
@="\"c:\\Utils\\set.iis.path.bat\" \"%1\""

# set.iis.path.bat #
@echo off
cscript.exe c:\Inetpub\AdminScripts\adsutil.vbs 
                                         SET /W3SVC/1/ROOT/Path "%1"
rmdir /s /q "C:\C:\Documents and Settings\Ralph\VSWebCache"

Environment and developer specific settings

You can achieve environment specific settings using two web.config files, one is the primary settings file and another overrides the primary config file variables with environments specific values. The article Team Development with Visual Studio .NET and Visual SourceSafe gives a good example of how you can achieve this by storing a database connection string for two different environments. Read the chapter Managing Dependencies, and scroll down to the section Referencing Databases for example code.

Now that you have your website(s) stored in Subversion, the following steps will help you automatically publish the contents of your repository to your development server. Subversion provides "hooks" for this process. These hooks allow you to trigger scripts or programs when certain events are raised by Subversion.

I've chosen to publish my repository to the development server anytime a user commits some changes. We'll use the post commit hook. You can, for example, hook scripts in the hook directory of where you created your Subversion repository. The hook scripts we created for this tutorial will be found in C:\svn\MyRepository\hooks\. Since we are using Windows, you can name your hook scripts .bat, .exe, .vbs etc.

I've created my hook scripts using bat files, if your not familiar with bat files the DOS batch file programming handbook and tutorial is a great place to start. You could also write VBS scripts or console apps depending on your skills and functional requirements.

To publish a Subversion repository, my bat file follows these steps:

1. If the Subversion and development server are separate servers, map a drive from the Subversion server to the development server.
2. Check out the repository you wish to publish to a temporary directory.
3. Use Robocopy to mirror the temporarily checked out version of your website to the development server directory.

Robocopy is a very powerful utility for directory mirroring, and can be downloaded as part of the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools. Check out the documentation for other functionality it can provide.

This bat file assumes your Subversion server and development server are two different machines. If they are on the same machine, this obviously simplifies things and the drive mapping is not necessary.

# post-commit.bat #
ECHO OFF
REM The following variables are passed via the
REM command line to the hook script from Subversion 
REM %1 -> Respository Name
REM %2 -> Revision number

REM Create our mapped drive as .bat files are run
REM by Subversion with NO environment variables set
net use Z: \\Server\TargetShare <pass> 
           /user:Server\<username> /persistent:no >> output.log

REM Check out our example repository to a tempoary directory
svn checkout file:///c:/svn/MyRepository/trunk C:\temp\Site1 >> output.log

REM Use Robocopy to mirror our directories 
REM and exclude from the mirroring certain files and directories.
robocopy C:\temp\Site1 Z:\Site1\wwwroot *.* /S /XF *.cs *.tmp *.dbg 
         *.tmpl *.sln *.csproj *.webinfo /XD .svn _svn /PURGE >> output.log

Note: You'll notice in the script that we direct the output from the commands to a log file; this is handy for debugging, particularly when Subversion is running the script. Robocopy will pump out to the log file a nicely formatted dump of what files have been transferred and other additional info.

Your website has now been published to your development server minus all the unnecessary files.

Revision History

• Created a better format for article layout
• Add some formatting that was removed when article was moved to Code Project
• Added Revision history
• Fixed up Error messages for each section and links to Microsoft KB articles
• Removed references section as it was out of context and put links into relevant sections
• Checked external links to ensure they still work
• 6.1 - updated as the new Tortise SVN client has option to work around .svn directory issue
• 7.10 - fixed some broken links to Subversion documentation

• Original article posted