Installing DotNetNuke 4.5 Source on a Vista box running IIS7

Here is a great blog post on how to install the DotNetNuke source on a Vista machine and get it up and running through an assumed Visual Studio 2005 SP1 for Vista which saved me a lot of hours of frustration! The main issue I had was configuring my IIS7 installation, it turns out that simply installing is not enough:

• you need to install the IIS6 compatibility extensions within the add features dialog
• you also need to install some other packages relating to ‘windows authentication’ and ASP.NET support that isn’t installed by default.

Finally, I needed to do an extra step to get it up and running which was to make a copy of the release.config file within the Website folder and rename it to web.config, then build the entire solution and set the website project as the default project, hit the debug button — and away to go!

Very impressed with the new setup wizard, it checks file permissions are set correctly — you need to allow NETWORK SERVICE full permissions over the Website folder, and the database connection is also working (I’m just using a SqlExpress database for dev work so no extra configuration needed!) with an opportunity to set these without delving into the web.config file.