Low cost ASP/VB/Access server solution for development?

Hi,
I find myself having to support a small ASP/VB/Access web application
for a customer of mine. (Our main expertise is PHP/MySQL/Apache).
Other than testing on the Customers ISP's Server, are there any low
cost ways to set up a Server environment in our office to
develop/support and test minor incremental changes to the application.
We have a W2000 Professional and Office Professional system but no MS
Server software.
Colin

re: Low cost ASP/VB/Access server solution for development?

"Colin McNaught" <cmcnaught@raytheon.com> wrote in message
news:3dfb5a6f.0409290737.37cb7dc5@posting.google.c om...[color=blue]
> Hi,
> I find myself having to support a small ASP/VB/Access web application
> for a customer of mine. (Our main expertise is PHP/MySQL/Apache).
> Other than testing on the Customers ISP's Server, are there any low
> cost ways to set up a Server environment in our office to
> develop/support and test minor incremental changes to the application.
> We have a W2000 Professional and Office Professional system but no MS
> Server software.
> Colin[/color]


You would probably be better off asking an asp newsgroup, however, I believe
Windows 2000 Pro has IIS included which is what you need to run your asp
pages. I don't think it is installed by default, so you may need to go into
"Add/Remove programs" then choose "Add/Remove Windows Components" and add
the IIS option from there.
You certainly don't need any additional server software such as W2K Server.

re: Low cost ASP/VB/Access server solution for development?

Colin,
MSDE is a desktop version of SQL Server that is included with MS Office
beginning with Office 2000. Personal Web Server is in Windows 98 and
becomes a small version of Internet Information Server (IIS) in Windows 2000
and Windows XP So, the software is there in most copies of Windows. It
just needs to be set up correctly. Access can host databases for a web
server. This is how FrontPage does things when it sets up a connection to a
database. But since MSDE is included with Office 2000 and everything
written for it will run on SQL Server with few or no changes, I'd use that
as my rdbms.

"Colin McNaught" <cmcnaught@raytheon.com> wrote in message
news:3dfb5a6f.0409290737.37cb7dc5@posting.google.c om...[color=blue]
> Hi,
> I find myself having to support a small ASP/VB/Access web application
> for a customer of mine. (Our main expertise is PHP/MySQL/Apache).
> Other than testing on the Customers ISP's Server, are there any low
> cost ways to set up a Server environment in our office to
> develop/support and test minor incremental changes to the application.
> We have a W2000 Professional and Office Professional system but no MS
> Server software.
> Colin[/color]

re: Low cost ASP/VB/Access server solution for development?

Eric Schittlipz wrote:
[color=blue]
> "Colin McNaught" <cmcnaught@raytheon.com> wrote in message
> news:3dfb5a6f.0409290737.37cb7dc5@posting.google.c om...[color=green]
>> Hi,
>> I find myself having to support a small ASP/VB/Access web application
>> for a customer of mine. (Our main expertise is PHP/MySQL/Apache).
>> Other than testing on the Customers ISP's Server, are there any low
>> cost ways to set up a Server environment in our office to
>> develop/support and test minor incremental changes to the application.
>> We have a W2000 Professional and Office Professional system but no MS
>> Server software.
>> Colin[/color]
>
>
> You would probably be better off asking an asp newsgroup, however, I
> believe Windows 2000 Pro has IIS included which is what you need to run
> your asp
> pages. I don't think it is installed by default, so you may need to go
> into "Add/Remove programs" then choose "Add/Remove Windows Components" and
> add the IIS option from there.
> You certainly don't need any additional server software such as W2K
> Server.[/color]

Yes, Windows 2000 Pro does have IIS included. All that you need is to run
Add/Remove Programs, Add/Remove Windows Components, and install IIS
Services. It will need an NTFS partition to store the web files.
Otherwise, it will already have everything to run ASP and VBScript pages,
including accessing an Access database.

re: Low cost ASP/VB/Access server solution for development?

Thanks a lot for your helpful answer, one follow up, will I have to
reformat one of my drives or can I add a partition without losing
data? The only space I have is on a disk which contains all my
Retrospect back-up images.
(apologies for the basic questions but I live in the M*c world :-)
Colin

Christopher Lewis <chris166@cox.net> wrote in message news:<FkI6d.686$gk.76@okepread01>...[color=blue]
> Eric Schittlipz wrote:
>[color=green]
> > "Colin McNaught" <cmcnaught@raytheon.com> wrote in message
> > news:3dfb5a6f.0409290737.37cb7dc5@posting.google.c om...[color=darkred]
> >> Hi,
> >> I find myself having to support a small ASP/VB/Access web application
> >> for a customer of mine. (Our main expertise is PHP/MySQL/Apache).
> >> Other than testing on the Customers ISP's Server, are there any low
> >> cost ways to set up a Server environment in our office to
> >> develop/support and test minor incremental changes to the application.
> >> We have a W2000 Professional and Office Professional system but no MS
> >> Server software.
> >> Colin[/color]
> >
> >
> > You would probably be better off asking an asp newsgroup, however, I
> > believe Windows 2000 Pro has IIS included which is what you need to run
> > your asp
> > pages. I don't think it is installed by default, so you may need to go
> > into "Add/Remove programs" then choose "Add/Remove Windows Components" and
> > add the IIS option from there.
> > You certainly don't need any additional server software such as W2K
> > Server.[/color]
>
> Yes, Windows 2000 Pro does have IIS included. All that you need is to run
> Add/Remove Programs, Add/Remove Windows Components, and install IIS
> Services. It will need an NTFS partition to store the web files.
> Otherwise, it will already have everything to run ASP and VBScript pages,
> including accessing an Access database.[/color]

re: Low cost ASP/VB/Access server solution for development?

Thanks for your advice,
My customer plans to be able to take a copy of the online .mdb Access
file on to her desktop computer on occasions to generate Reports using
Access. Would you still see an advantage in using MSDE/SQL Server as
part of my development environment?
Colin

"Alan Webb" <knogeek@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:<8-ydneBwDaTB0MbcRVn-rQ@comcast.com>...[color=blue]
> Colin,
> MSDE is a desktop version of SQL Server that is included with MS Office
> beginning with Office 2000. Personal Web Server is in Windows 98 and
> becomes a small version of Internet Information Server (IIS) in Windows 2000
> and Windows XP So, the software is there in most copies of Windows. It
> just needs to be set up correctly. Access can host databases for a web
> server. This is how FrontPage does things when it sets up a connection to a
> database. But since MSDE is included with Office 2000 and everything
> written for it will run on SQL Server with few or no changes, I'd use that
> as my rdbms.
>
> "Colin McNaught" <cmcnaught@raytheon.com> wrote in message
> news:3dfb5a6f.0409290737.37cb7dc5@posting.google.c om...[color=green]
> > Hi,
> > I find myself having to support a small ASP/VB/Access web application
> > for a customer of mine. (Our main expertise is PHP/MySQL/Apache).
> > Other than testing on the Customers ISP's Server, are there any low
> > cost ways to set up a Server environment in our office to
> > develop/support and test minor incremental changes to the application.
> > We have a W2000 Professional and Office Professional system but no MS
> > Server software.
> > Colin[/color][/color]

re: Low cost ASP/VB/Access server solution for development?

Colin,
EBay? A Dell PowerEdge 2300 server can be had for under $500.00, OS
included. MSDE--Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Edition is free, dunno how
much a licensable used copy of SQL Server 7 or later is worth. I wouldn't
recommend this because it's a hack and doesn't really result in a legitimate
license, but I discovered I could install MSDE from my Office XP CD, then
upgrade it to a trial version of SQL Server, only adding Enterprise Manager
and the other admin tools. The trial CD was good for 120 days. After that
I lost some capabilities not supported in MSDE but I still had an instance
of SQL Server that I could use to test my stuff against.

"Colin McNaught" <cmcnaught@raytheon.com> wrote in message
news:3dfb5a6f.0409290737.37cb7dc5@posting.google.c om...[color=blue]
> Hi,
> I find myself having to support a small ASP/VB/Access web application
> for a customer of mine. (Our main expertise is PHP/MySQL/Apache).
> Other than testing on the Customers ISP's Server, are there any low
> cost ways to set up a Server environment in our office to
> develop/support and test minor incremental changes to the application.
> We have a W2000 Professional and Office Professional system but no MS
> Server software.
> Colin[/color]