Sitecore 5.3 & Vista RC2

So, i've been running Vista RC2 now on my laptop and I have to say that all this fuzz about bugs and crashes and whatever people keep screeming about all over the net seems -way- exaggerated.. well, either that or these people are trying to install it on a pc that was outdated even back when bellbottoms were cool.. Anyway, that's not the point. What i was getting to is that, for me, Vista is a huge improvement compared to todays systems, and that's good. However, there's always a catch, otherwise there's no point in writing about it, but considering that it's still just RC2 -hopefully- these issues will be fixed when it's released. Configuring things like IIS7, or even installing Web Applications Projects update for Visual Studio 2005, or "Atlas"/ASP.NET AJAX is anything but easy and user-friendly. After hours of failed installations I finally got them all running the way they should, and then I proceeded to my final goal, installing Sitecore 5.3.. Again, another no-go-zone (at least, for me). The installer crashed, bigtime, and pretty much won't let me do anything.. First up it crashes in the background after selecting the licence file, I get a notification saying that InstallDriver Module has stopped working.. What's interesting though is that I'm simply able to close the popup and continue with the installation. At this stage i'm going "Heeey, that's neat." but unfortunately that only lasts a minute until it throws another error: Error 1609:.. ASPNET user is not a valid user or group.. And that's where I'm at right now. Might have to manually configure the ASPNET user (shouldn't tho, but who knows?). If/When I get this up and running i'll post again.. UPDATE: Well, here's what has to be done:

1. Make sure Vista is configured to recognize IIS6 actions/scripts etc. This can be done by checking the appropriate boxes under the IIS part of the "Turn Windows features on or off".
2. Install .NET Framework 1.1 (and updates).
3. Turn the UAP off (not sure if this really is needed, but that's what I did).
4. Run the installer as administrator (right click the installer, "Run as Administrator").

For me it still crashes in the beginning with that InstallDriver Module error, but after that the installer runs (read "is now running" since i'm installing right now) smoothly..

UPDATE 2:

Well, the happiness of the first update was not kept alive for long. After the installation finished (which it did and that was nice) I'm now stuck at the next obstacle - When trying to access localhost all I got at first was an error message saying it couldn't read the config file and a wierd "Could not load all ISAPI filters for site". So, like every other time something goes wrong, I added Network Service and the other system roles to the website and it's content, allowing full access for ease of use. Voila, time to see the next error, and this one is regarding changes made to the handling of the actual web.config file itself. This part was a little more tricky since it's not at all that well documented..

Below is what i've done so far (and as of right now I'm not at all sure about this solution, maybe there's a best-practice way to go about all this, but since I haven't seen one yet I'll keep on trying).

1. Create a system.webServer node
2. Move HttpModules and HttpHandlers from system.web to system.webServer
3. Rename HttpModules to modules
4. Rename HttpHandlers to handlers

So far all I get is that it's missing a http handler and nothing will load, but perhaps I'll have it fixed soon..

UPDATE 3:

Well, this is a situation with IIS7 having two options to run the site in: "Classic .NET Mode" or "Integrated .NET mode", the later of the two is what they recommend for IIS7 and future versions. Fine, they want us to move up, that's alright. But right now I don't care, I just want it to run. So, if you want to try and load it into the Integrated .NET mode (which I'm trying to), keep thinking and comment, otherwise you can run a command in the command promt to switch it to Classic .NET mode.

%systemroot%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe set app "SITENAMEHERE/" /applicationPool:"Classic .NET AppPool"

FINAL UPDATE:

When all else fails, admit you've probably done something stupid and save yourself the worry by simply scrapping the old installation and do a new one. Lesson learned.

Hope this will help you install it on Vista if you run across these problems as well.

Take care, P.