Question

I’m a LAMP developer through and through, but I’ve been handed an ASP.NET project built using TFS. Sorting the code isn’t much of a problem; I can figure most of that out, but TFS is doing my head in.

What are the steps I need to take to be able to test the website source locally on my own computer?

I’ve got IIS installed and localhost is able to show .asp and .aspx pages, but it looks like the source code stored locally by Visual Studio isn’t configured to actually run – it needs to be “built” before it’ll function as a site.

The documentation I’ve ploughed through seems to have been written by… well… Microsoft, so despite everything probably being perfectly logical it makes no sense.

Answer 1

Setting up your development environment has nothing to do with TFS. Since you have clearly got the code, you’ve finished with TFS until you want to make a change (or log a work item like a defect).

You need to set up IIS, and make sure the Visual Studio project is configured to match.

1. Note the path of the ASP.NET project folder (not the solution folder).
2. In IIS, create a new web application
   • Mapping to the path noted above
   • Associate with a application pool using the correct version of .NET.
   • You might want to increase the timeout of that application pool to make debugging easier: having the request timeout in the middle of a complex debugging session is annoying. (I normally create a debug application pool for each .NET version I’m working with).
3. Run Visual Studio as administrator
4. Open the solution.
5. In the web application’s project’s properties under “Web”, set the path to the web application created in IIS. This can be set globally (will be saved in the project file) or locally (only affects this machine).

NB. IIS Express avoids the need to run as administrator and provides (as I understand) all the functionality of IIS for development and debugging.