Problems with EPiServer 5 R2 and MS Vista

Here are a few problems which I have encountered while installing the latest EPiServer 5 R2 on MS Vista. It's nothing major but hopefully it will help someone.

So what can possibly go wrong?

1) In my case whole installation went smoothly, the first problem came out when I was expecting to see the normal start page of public templates. Error message was:

Compiler Error Message: CS0016: Could not write to output file 'c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files\xxxxxx\xxxx

Luckily problem wasn't difficult to solve, it was a matter of permissions ... detailed solution can be found here.


2) Second problem was a bit strange -- I coudn't access edit and admin modes even though I was one hundred percent sure that credentials were okey and I was able to log in.

If you were playing with EPiServer before then probably you know that only certain roles can access edit/admin modes and it's configured in web.config. By default WebAdmins, Administrators can access both admin and edit modes; for WebEditors only edit mode is accessible. So the obvious thing to check was if my user belonged to any of those groups.

Surprisingly, I didn't have on my Vista group called Administrators ... why? Because I use localized version of Vista and group Administrators is localized and in my case called "Administratorzy" :)

Solution in such case is modifying the web.config by adding/updating the Administrator group name.

And that was it ... EPiServer 5 R2 was running fine :)

3) In the end I wanted to open Public Templates project to take a look if everything is as it used to be ... and yet another surprise:



Well, unfortunately Windows Vista Home Premium can't have Windows Authentication installed. It's a big shame and it was stoping Visual Studio from opening the project. I just wanted to take a look, I didn't need to debug this application on IIS but still Visual Studio was determined to keep the project closed.

The fastest workaround is to open project file in the notepad and modify the UseIIS property:

 <WebProjectProperties>
 <UseIIS>True</UseIIS>
 <AutoAssignPort>True</AutoAssignPort>
 <DevelopmentServerPort>50713</DevelopmentServerPort>
 <DevelopmentServerVPath>/</DevelopmentServerVPath>
 <IISUrl>http://localhost/</IISUrl>
 <NTLMAuthentication>False</NTLMAuthentication>
 <UseCustomServer>False</UseCustomServer>
 <CustomServerUrl>
 </CustomServerUrl>
 <SaveServerSettingsInUserFile>False</SaveServerSettingsInUserFile>
 </WebProjectProperties>

If you set UseIIS property to False, Visual Studio won't complain about missing Windows Authentication module anymore, easy?