Building a complete .NET Platform with Visual Studio 2008 on your Vista Ultimate Desktop or Notebook...

Here is my ... how to

First install the necessary software....

You can use the free trial 90 days Visual Studio 2008 Professional edition or the free Express edition
Download the SQL 2008 Vista Server Management Express for easy setting up your databases... here

Set up the IIS7 Webserver on Vista as I described here

Your IIS7 webserver is installed when you can see the IIS7 page on http://localhost

Install the Visual Studio 2008 suite (all standard, next, next, finish)

Install the SQL 2008 Server Management Express (all standard, next, next, finish)

and there we are ready to go on our new created .NET Platform for developing 'state of the art' applications or websites...

Set up DotNetNuke 5 Development environment on your new created .NET platform !  here is how to do

Download (register first) the DotNetNuke 5 INSTALL edition from the official DotNetNuke website

Unzip the zip file to c:\inetpub\wwwroot\DotNetNuke

In Explorer set 'Full Control' security on c:\inetpub\wwwroot\DotNetNuke for the user NETWORK SERVICE,

Start SQL 2008 Server Management Express and login

In the Databases tab create a new Database with a name....

In the Security tab, select Logins and click with the right mouse and select New Login to create one

Give the new login a name, select SQL Authentication and configure a login user, four configuration items are needed: login name, authentication type, login password, and database permissions.

It is imperative that the “ User must change password at next login ” option is not selected. If this option is selected, then the user account will not be able to properly log in to the server.

Once the needed “ general ” information has been provided for the user, you are now ready to configure the permissions to grant the account full access to the database created earlier. Select User Mapping from the option area in the left pane of the Login - New window. 

Ensure that you check the box next to your database in the top pane, and that the db_owner option is elected in the lower pane, as shown in the figure.

After this is completed, simply click OK.

Your database for DotNetNuke 5 is created (but empty)

Now we need to configure the IIS 7 webserver, type inetmgr in the windows searchbox and click enter for the DotNetNuke website configuration

When clicking on the Default Website tab you can see the DotNetNuke map in the right frame view.

Select the DotNetNuke map and click on your right mouse, select convert to application, when opened the box, simple click OK

That's it for 99%

Now we only need to configure the web.config file with the proper connection Database configuration setup,  only the name from the Dabase !

Tomorrow I believe it's time for a nap !