Month: April 2010

Microsoft Web Platform Installer (Web PI) is a free tool that makes getting the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform easy. This includes the latest Visual Web Developer 2010 Express, ASP.NET 4, and ASP.NET MVC2.

Web PI can also be used to download open source projects which works on PHP and MySQL. Web PI will guide you throughout the process of downloading, installing, and configuring all software that are required. Following are some screen captures, showing how easy it will be to download and install the popular publishing platform [ WordPress ] with just a few clicks!

Firstly, you will need to logon to your Windows operating system using an administrative account. This could be Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP SP2+, Windows Server 2003 SP1+, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Server 2008 R2.

Then, download and execute Web PI that can be found at http://www.Microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx
Here’s how Web Platform Installer v2.0 looks like.

 

Choose [WordPress], and press [Install]. Web PI will proceed to detect 3rd-party applications that need to be downloaded (PHP, MySQL, WordPress), and the Microsoft products and components that need to be installed and configured (IIS).

As MySQL will need to be installed in order to support WordPress, Web PI will prompt for the root password of MySQL.

Press [Continue], and the installation starts. Web PI will download, install, and configure all of the software for you!

Web PI will then prompt for the site information for setting up an IIS web site.
(You will need to grant appropriate permission for IIS to access the folder as specified in the ‘physical path’.)
(Your should absolutely have a different Web site setting!)

And the next step is MySQL database settings.

 

It’s that easy! Go, and give it a try!

===== For more information =====

~ Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0
http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx

~ Microsoft Web Platform Installer: The Official Microsoft IIS Site
http://www.iis.net/webpi

~ WordPress
http://wordpress.org

 

The keystrokes [ Ctrl + <comma> ] in Visual Studio 2010 is used to navigate to your line of interest! … and, you should soon forget about what [ Ctrl + F ] is, after using [ Ctrl + <comma> ] !!

Suppose that you need to search for the string ‘ConnectToSqlDatabase’ in your solution, you can press [ Ctrl + <comma> ], and the [ Navigate To ] dialog pops up.
Typing ‘Con’ for the search terms, and…

What happened here is that the number of matching results are decreased as I type ‘Con’ character by character.
You can then click on a matching result, and jump to the line of source code that matches the search term.

Another useful feature is that [ Navigate To ] also recognize search terms in Pascal Case!
Suppose that you do not know whether the function is called [ Connect…(something)…SqlDatabase ], or is called [ Change…(something)…SqlDatabase ], but you know that they both have pascal case ‘CSD’…

And, pascal case is not just limited to Intellisense, but also for the search terms in the [ Navigate To ] feature…. ( Ctrl + <comma> )

So, may I ‘also’ forget about [ Ctrl + F ] even when I am using Microsoft Office… some day?
… Just joking, of course   🙂