This blog is going to have surfing, snowboarding, tech stuff and maybe some 'meaning of life' stuff if I'm feeling particularly stoked.

Saturday, November 20, 2004

Microsoft Don't Surf!

If they did, they wouldn't have slyly removed the ability for XP Pro users to add more than one web site to their IIS 5.1 configurations! This Microsoft tactic reeks of greed and mean-spiritedness, two qualities which I hope would never be attributed to any fellow surfer.

I definitely did not intend my first techie post to be an anti-Microsoft diatribe so I will keep this one short and as sweet as possible.

While I realise Microsoft is not a charity it seems this un-feature goes very much against their doctrine of being developer-focused. I want to "develop" my sites on XP Pro but I want to "run" them on W2xx Server and am happy to pay for that production environment.

Anyway this post was going to be about how an ISAPI filter like multisite could get round the problem and maybe even give some background on ISAPI filters but since I couldn't actually get this thing to work with our ASP.NET web sites I'll leave it a pure rant for now. BTW multisite works great if you have simple html pages and a simple site structure. It won't work for ASP.NET but if you're really desperate Steven Cohn has another workaround using admin scripts but that one also has limitations which mean it doesn't suit my needs.

I'm getting used to this blogging, I could write all night but I have to go.

b.

PS If you don't recognise the film quote I've borrowed for the title of this post check out Apocalypse Now, the famous surf scene is one of my favourite movie moments.