Super!

Nothing is more more encouraging to us than seeing community members taking over where we left off!

Ryan, have you had a chance to run your application on a clean installation of XP? There might be additional steps necessary, like create "Temporary ASP.NET Files" folder, in case ASP.NET has never been registered on the computer. We will do it on our own, but we recommend trying your application on clean x32 and x64 first systems.

Best regards,
UltiDev Team.

Yesterday, I had my client run Simple.bat - and it worked beautifully. The local ASP.NET application opened up in his browser.

He is an end-user, not a developer. Thus, I would highly doubt his machine has ever had ASP.NET installed. Additionally, His computer is part of a very large corporation with very tight security policies. Yet - our Standalone Web Application ran on his machine without a hitch. That says a lot.

It does, however, require that .NET Framework 2.0 be installed.

I would love to hear from other people - What successes & problems have people had?



I'm not an MS Ajax guy - can someone else help us here?

Ryan

Ryan, again, great job!
We have tested it a bit and found a few things to be aware of:

1. Vista issue [Updated]. UltiDev Cassini, when running in no-installation mode under Vista, is failing to get browser's process handle. It starts the browser, but acts as if browser process failed to start: Cassini quits and browser gets launched pointing to the URL that is no longer valid. So far no viable workaround was found. It is possible to launch Cassini serving the app with "nobrowser" command line parameter, but it is of no use for end user if browser cannot be launched automatically. Also, we found that if Firefox is installed and specified as a browser ("%ProgrmaFiles%\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" for browser cmd line parameter), then application launches successfully.

2. Windows Firewall nagging. Since normally Windows Firewall exceptions get created during UltiDev Cassini installation, running Cassini as embedded server will bring the nagging. This may be changed in the next release of UltiDev Cassini.

3. Event Source. Since Windows Event Log source for UltiDev Cassini gets created at installation time, no events/error get logged into Event Log. This may be fixed in the next release.

4. Reduced security. When Cassini runs, it can accept requests from remote machines. When Cassini is running under interactive user account, which is often has administrative privileges, there is a danger of remote malicious program scanning ports and funding Cassini on it. Should you application get breached, an attacker may get a complete control over host system. To minimize exposure, please lock down your application by making it accepting only local requests.

Best regards,
UltiDev Team.

I was having trouble with getting it to run off the flash drive, the browser kept crashing as per above, although it ran perfectly on the computer directly.

I thought I'd share my solution to this problem as I noticed above that the Ultidev stated there is no known solution so far.

What I did was create 2 batch files. The first one copies the 2nd batch file to the c:\ root and executes the file from c:\. The copied file from c:\ then runs the webserver off the flash drive and deletes itself.

MyBat1.bat

---

copy .\Setup\MyBat2.bat c:\
CALL c:\MyBat2.bat %cd%

MyBat2.bat

---

%~d1\Cassini\ultidevcassinwebserver2.exe /run "%~d1\WebApp"
del C:\MyBat2.bat

I don't understand why running it off the computer works but off the flash drive it doesn't, but this solution works great for me. This is based on rdhatch's method of deployment.

Cheers

Dave

Dave,

Thanks much for sharing your solution!

One thing we can suggest is to replace hard-coded "c:" in your BAT files with %SystemDrive% environment variable.

Best regards,
UltiDev Team.

Hi Folks,

Sorry to burst bubbles here but I suspect the Vista machines you've been working with are not virgin. I'm running on a virgin machine with no messing around with the UAC or anything else.

There is no way that the launch from a Flash drive works. That I can confirm. Vista's permissions simply do not allow it. It's seen by Vista as a foreign application, I think and therefore it is trying to cross security boundaries that Vista won't allow.

Also, if you try to launch from C: or any other drive, particularly under .NET 1.1, permission is denied for access to the temp folder of the framework. It appears that Vista simply does not allow direct access to that folder and it seems that, because the UltiDev Request Processor dll is not registered, there is no permission being granted to it to make such access.

Further, I tried the suggestion of starting from C: via a .bat file and it, too, doesn't work for the same reason. I tried with both 1.1 and 2.0 frameworks and the appropriate files provided by Ryan Hatch.

And there's more. When the flash launches, Vista throws up its permission dialogs. In the meantime, UltiDev continues trying to launch and fails to find the web page, because the user is busy trying to make his/her way through those dialogs.

If anyone has any solution to this, I'd be most interested in hearing about it. I may be doing something wrong, but I've tried about everything I can think of.

Also, if anyone has a simple example of their solution running on Vista, please post it and I will try it promptly and report back to you.

Regards,
Fred

Hi,

Unfortunately, DLL or not, I don't think the solution you suggest is going to work on Vista, plain and simple. The reason is the new cross-domain (cross-boundary) limitations imposed by Vista which will not allow a non-registered DLL access into the runtime .NET framework folder.

By the way, if the UAC is turned off, Vista will allow such access, but, of course, you shouldn't ever turn off UAC.

Regards,
FredD

Hello,

If you are asking about set of binaries allowing UltiDev Cassini to run standalone apps, please contact rdhatch.

Best regards,
UltiDev Team.

Ryan,

Lost of folks are interested in the possibility of running ASP.NET apps in Vista from a removable drive, like flash or CD. Your screencast shows that the ASP.NET app can run from a local hard drive under UltiDev Cassini without having to have Cassini installed, but that was not in doubt for quite a while. There seems to be a consensus that EXEs from removable drives can't be launched on Vista with UAC turned on. Do you have any insights on this one?

Best regards,
UltiDev Team.

Thank you, Ryan.

Just wanted to confirm that Vista with UAC on is still a problem.

Best regards,
UltiDev Team.