Last week I had to setup a quick demo environment for an existing ASP.NET application. It was an interesting lesson in the integration (or lack thereof) when it comes to Microsoft products. The application was fairly simple, and had a few key components;
- An IIS server with the relevant version of the .NET Framework.
- IIS to have a correctly configured virtual server
- MS SQL server with the relevant databases
- Active directory for authentication
Nothing too complex there, however, this was a demo environment - which needed to run on a laptop - which doesn't have active directory on it. So, what can you do? Well, at this point in time I'm not so sure. There are options to modify the web.config to point to an LDAP server, which just means I need to setup an LDAP server on the laptop as this thing needs to run in a disconnected state. The other option is to edit the code - but the application is quite large, so that's going to be quite a lot of editing required. Throughout the process some of the architecture just seemed to be so loosely linked together, it was a bit of a worrying feeling. It might have been that some of the error messages were simply kind of new to me, or it could have been the things required to fix those messages didn't seem
In hindsight, I guess none of it was any less stable than some of the techniques you might use in Domino - hardcoding a view name in your field lookup code, having text replica ids or path/filenames in configuration documents, etc etc. Maybe once I've deployed a few largish applications of this nature into production environments and had them run happily for months without problems I'll gain some faith in these things, but until then I'm remaining cautious.