Setting up your workstation

Hopefully if you are reading this tutorial, you already have the first piece of equipment necessary for developing in ASP.Net – a personal computer running a current operating system.

The specification of the computer is not critical but you may find developing on an old workstation frustrating at best and inefficient or impossible at worst. That’s not to say that you will need an all singing, all dancing, modern PC and most computers capable of running Windows 2000 Professional or Windows XP Professional should do the trick. Note that I stated the Professional versions of Windows 2000 and XP. Although you can work on other versions, you should be aware that Microsoft’s Web Server – Internet Information Services (IIS) - comes as part of Windows 2000 and XP Professional editions and this may become a crucial part of your development efforts.

You should bear in mind that many of the tools used in developing modern web applications can put a strain on a modest PC so you may need plenty of memory and a reasonable amount of hard drive space. Typically you could be working with several applications open at once and you can expect to have open:

· Windows Explorer (to create folders and move files around)

· Internet Explorer (to view and test your application or web page)

· Development Software (in which you will write the code)

· A graphics package (to create images as required)

· Style Sheet editor (to style your application)

While it is not strictly necessary to have all of the above applications open at once, for example you may have a graphic artist that provides your images, in practice, unless you are prepared to constantly open and close applications, it is likely that you will end up with a busy desktop. You can work with any workstation that you have available to you but bear in mind that the job may become harder and you will require more patience when working on an older machine. My own opinion is that anything older than Pentium 3 (or equivalent) with 512 Ram is likely to be a painful experience and assuming that your project has any level of commercial significance, then upgrading your workstation will be justified.

<<ASP.NET development tools

Options for a web server>>