It’s been while since I have used the language, so I thought it would be fun to try making a few new ideas with it.

I did a quick search to see what PHP IDEs were available.  I’ve used Eclipse quite a lot, but I’m not particularly fond of it, so I wanted to try something else.

I plan on giving NetBeans a chance to see how it fairs.
http://www.netbeans.org/features/php/

Seeing as I am currently using Vista Ultimate 64-bit, I decided to just use IIS. I had a few quips getting it working.

I had modified IIS beforehand when I was doing some old VbScript coding, so needless to say when I tried installing PHP it didn’t work out of the box.

In the IIS configuration program (use the start button search in vista on “InetMgr”):
- Install PHP as a ISAPI filter.
- In your selected application pool advances settings, make sure that “Managed Pipeline Mode” is set to “Classic” mode.
In the list of global settings:
- Add a default document “index.php”
- In ISAPI Filters, add a new filter that points to (most likely) “C:\Program Files (x86)\PHP\php5isapi.dll”
- In Handler Mappings, add a PHP entry “*.php” that also points to “C:\Program Files (x86)\PHP\php5isapi.dll”
- In that same screen look over to the right for “View Ordered List…” to make sure that the PHP entry is at the top so it gets priority over the static page handler.

What I also did was have my IIS Site point directly to the default NetBeans project directory. The issue I had there was file permissions. I changed the “Basic Settings…” option to connect as my personal login. Seeing as this is only for development, I don’t see any issues with that. I also changed my default binding to “127.0.0.1,” which should only allow access from the computer itself. Not that it matters as this computer is behind a router

There are quite a few issues in getting classic asp scripts working on vista. I want to quickly go over what I did, so that when I need this information available in the future I have an easy place to find it. So to save time I am just trying to get this written as fast as possible and continue on with my work. Sorry for any typos.

Install IIS through control panel -> programs and features -> (left panel) “turn windows features on or off”

Once the feature listing window populates:
expand the “internet information services” item
check web management tools and world wide web services
…really I went through the options and selected the majority of them.
Key ASP related items to make sure you have selected:
“world wide web services” -> “application development features” -> ASP

I needed windows authentication, so I needed:
“world wide web services” -> “sercurity” -> “windows authentication”

After that, I had issues when trying to read access database files with JET. The main issue here is that a 64-bit driver does not exist. So we need to change the webserver to allow 32-bit software to run. I found generally how to fix this here.

That link above didn’t exactly work for me though. It was probably done with a slightly older or newer version of IIS that I have installed.

Start up the IIS control panel by going to “control panel” -> “administrative tools” -> “Internet information services manager”

First, select the “application pools” item in the left panel. If you only have one application pool (displayed in the middle window after selecting “application pools”), then you should add a new one called something like “classic 32-bit asp application pool.” Mine came with a “classic .net app pool,” which I used.

click on the pool that you want to make 32-bit. From the right-most panel you should see an option for “set application pool defaults…” Inside the window that pops-up change the option “enable 32-bit applications” to TRUE.

Next, we need to change our site to use that pool. Select “sites” from the left-most panel. Select “default website” or whatever site you want to assign. Then select “basic settings…” from the right-most panel. the pop-up will have a button labeled “select” for application pools. Click that and select our 32-bit pool.

Now you should be able to develop classic ASP sites that use MS Access database files. Just make sure you have the Jet access database drivers installed. If not, do a search on “MDAC” (Microsoft Data Access Components) or maybe “JET Access Driver” on microsoft.com and find the drivers to install.

This website showed how to enable error displaying to the web browser:
%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd set config -section:asp -scriptErrorSentToBrowser:true

Run that command in a command prompt that has administration abilities. If you don’t do that, you will just get a generic error message when something doesn’t run in the script.