I've been thinking...

[TomWilko]

After getting annoyed at finding out ASP won't work on XP I have been thinking of ways to allow me to practice ASP somehow.

The 2 ideas I came up with were:

- Upgrade to XP Professional [expensive!]

- Purchase a domain and some web-hosting that would allow ASP on their site.

Now...if i bought some hosting space would this allow me to start working with ASP straight away? Also...where could I get this hosting from and roughly how much should I be looking at per month? Surely the cost and benefits would be better than upgrading to XP Pro. Also, would I need to do anything to my PC that would allow me to start working with ASP i.e download more programs that aren't compatible with XP Home?!!!

Cheers for any advice

Tom

[fondie]

If you got some web hosting with ASP support it would indeed work straight away (as soon as they'd enabled your account at least), you just upload your ASP files that you create in notepad/dreamweaver whatever via FTP to the server. There are numerous free FTP clients that will work just fine on XP home Then just enter your website domain in your browser and watch your magical dynamic content unfold before you, or sometihng like that.

Some possibly free hosts, probably have to include links or the like for most/all of them, but may be worth checking out if you're on a real budget.

http://www.aspfree.com/asp/freeasphost.asp

Otherwise I imagine a windows host with asp support could run you from less than £2 a month e.g. http://www.web-hosting.uk.com/packages/ (very basic and no idea about service but they seem to meet my interpretation of your requirements) to the sky being the limit.

Check out places like http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ and http://hosthideout.com/ for opinions on different hosts, you want windows shared hosting, it's usually a bit more than the linux equivalents but it's what you're looking for for ASP support. You do tend to get what you pay for with hosting in terms of reliability, service and speed but you just want something cheap n' nasty to practice with.

[Spunkey]

www.brinkster.com does a free ASP enabled account service. It has ads and is a bit slow, but for free you cant complain.

[TomWilko]

I had my Internet Development lecture today and I learnt a bit more about what we were getting from the UNI. We have access to their ASP server so that'll fine for me to do development on in the time being...this can only be done in UNI though.

So, to sidestep slightly I have stuck my neck out and went for an OEM of XP Pro...my decision, i'll live with it if its wrong, but the way I see it I am going to use the UNI lectures as a starter to learning the various Internet languages so its a bit of an investment for me

Thanks for your help again guys...no doubt soon enough you'll be getting threads asking for help on silly stuff i am stuck on

[yamangman]

Can't you grab some software that will setup a pseudo server for you, and run your scripts from there? I'm sort of sure Microsoft has some such software freely available.

[Spunkey]

i know Personal IIS Server was available with Windows 98 & 2000 - surprised its not an option on XP Home. Have you had a search around the XP CD, or the install windows components bit in CP?

[Purple]

does Apache not support ASP? at least with a magical plugin?

[ikonia]

Purple, there are a few web server plugins for ASP, Chillsort is the only one I can think of but I know there are at least 2 others.

The projects I've worked on (not coded them) that involved ASP where very basic and they worked fine, however others on this forum have posted that the plugins don't work well with more complex ASP content.

[yamangman]

Microsft changed the name of IIS with the XP release, and I can't remember what it's called, and i'm sure this new named version works on XP Pro.

[TomWilko]

i know Personal IIS Server was available with Windows 98 & 2000 - surprised its not an option on XP Home. Have you had a search around the XP CD, or the install windows components bit in CP?

XP Home doesn't let you use IIS or Personal Web Server, I had to upgrade to XP Pro to get the use of it.

Everything is set up now and working fine Working my way through my book so it won't be long till I have some idea about how this ASP stuff works.

[yamangman]

PWS, thats the one.