Getting Remote Site Files to Run Locally

Hello Sitepoint!

I love your guys’ books and have a good many. I have another account on the site for PHP/APACHE goodies, but I figured I would make one for work as I recently accepted a ASP.NET position(job times are tough when you go from PHP to .NET…JK:x).

Anyways, I am a little rusty with .NET and IIS(since college I suppose) but have been crunching the language the last couple weeks. The problem, I believe, is that I have walked into a mine field…The previous developer doesn’t have much in the way of documentation and the MIS group is at a loss when it comes to what I need. My question is what is the best way to test the sites locally in .NET land?

The MIS group pulled the live files(uncompiled) from the server and put them into Vault which is fine. The problem arises when I pull these onto my local machine and try to use Visual Studio’s development server. It loads but there are some quirks with images not being loaded, styles not being applied, and 404’s all over the place. I’m sure this is going to be a configuration nightmare.

Has anyone been in this scenario(come on, I know someone has) and could they point me in the right direction as the best way to tackle this? Does anyone know some good spots for references or training with IIS to get this running locally?

Thanks in advance guys, I know this is rather generic.

You run Windows 7, or? Can you get a local test environment with Windows 2003/2008 and IIS?

Regardless of the OS you should run the site in IIS and MS SQL Express Edition locally. It will be free and it should run without issue assuming you have the site and it’s setting configured correctly specific to that application.

Yeah, I am running windows 7. The site has been put in a repository on our network, which the files were just pulled from the live site. Luckily they were uncompiled.

I am going to have to figure out how to setup a shared development environment for a outside agency we use for larger projects but I need to get this thing to run locally first. I have setup IIS 7(local version) but I don’t think I am savvy enough in IIS to get it to run properly. Do you know of any good resources for this?

Well … my resources are inside my head so I don’t have any favorite book marks or anything to show you how to accomplish what you need. But these first few links on this result should point you in the right direction: http://www.google.com/#hl=en&sugexp=kjrmc&cp=29&gs_id=2z&xhr=t&q=setup+website+iis+7+windows+7&qe=c2V0dXAgd2Vic2l0ZSBpaXMgNyB3aW5kb3dzIDc&qesig=Cc5MOwkAIDS4Ty7gzgdESA&pkc=AFgZ2tnd1WtH0m_zWCHeuliGInz6G5x0F0tElbfVwgOAMN1XGchUwwstrsY56GdMzeQcndaSGEN7w_5J6zZtHnbJQLlTau_Twg&pf=p&sclient=psy-ab&safe=off&site=&source=hp&pbx=1&oq=setup+website+iis+7+windows+7&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=&gs_upl=&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&fp=8e7fa2636e8b849&biw=1630&bih=768

You are also going to need to restore the MS SQL database… that is a whole other process. Just google restore MS SQL database SQL 2008 Express (depending on the version you install) I know it’s easy to say “just google this” and when you haven’t done the process before it can be tough. Sorry but that is all I can really provide right now. If you get stuck at any point feel free to reply to this thread and I can try to assist. Take care and good luck

Thanks for the reply! I’ll take a peek at some resources and see what I can figure out. If anything I might be able to post the config file(edited sensitive data) as I believe that is the culprit. I just need to get my local version of IIS on the same page I believe. I’ll keep you posted and thanks again for the helping hand!