I've had my head down for a couple of years, blithly developing web apps using VWD 2008 Express and PC apps using Visual Studio 2005.
Thanks to a computer crash, I am now trying to create a workable and sane development environment on a Windows 8 PC. My first priority is to port my earlier development projects to this platform.
For starters, I downloaded and installed VWD 2008. This turned out to be incompatible with IIS 8 that comes with Win 8 PCs. After reading the fine print, I see that neither VWD 2008 Express nor VWD 2010 Express are listed as being compatible with Windows 8. So I look again at the VWD and Vis Studio lineup, and I see:
Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web
Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows 8
Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop
Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Phone
I am assuming that with VSE 2012 for Web I can continue working on projects that I have built using VWD 2008 Express on a Vista PC. Can someone confirm that this is true?
I am also assuming that with VSE 2012 for Windows Desktop I can can continue working on Windows Forms projects that I have built using Visual Studio 2005. Can someone confirm that this is true?
I have Visual Studio 2005 on a CD. Is this useable on a Windows 8 PC?
Thanks for any guidance you can offer.
Update 1 : I installed VSE 2012 for Web. It installed IIS Express (I had previously 'installed' IIS 8 by using "Turn Windows Features On and Off").
It appears that IIS 8 Sites are referenced by http://localhost (which seems to default to localhost:80) whereas IIS Express Sites are referenced byhttp://localhost:8080 Also, it seems that to create a new ASP.Net Web Forms Site under IIS, you must Run VSE as Administrator.
Question: How can you set "Run as Administrator"
permanently for an application? As far as I can tell you must do this each time you launch the program.
After using VSE 2012 creating a simple website under IIS, I found that you can't debug it and you can't run it. Very nice.
Question: Just why do I want IIS 8 on my PC?
After creating a simple website under IIS Express, I found that you can debug it and you can run it.
Update 2:
Using "Turn Windows Features On and Off" I 'removed' IIS 8 from Windows. But it's still there. Still doesn't do anything for me except make 'localhost' unavailable to IIS Express (I have to use 'http://localhost:8080' to get to IIS Express sites).
Question: I assume that somewhere a default for 'localhost' is set to 'localhost:80'. Is there a way to change this to 'localhost:8080' ??
Meanwhile IIS Express seems to be contained in folders under My Documents (strange), and I can find no way to configure this software. IIS, which does nothing for me, remains available under Control Panel > Administrative Tools and is highly configurable even though unusable.
I will continue to update this thread as I discover more about using this wonderful new OS. Maybe it will help someone somewhere.