Hello, Posaunne!

Thank you for the positive feedback on our Cassini. It means a lot to us.

We have to admit that we haven't seriously considered the use case where Cassini 1.1 components would be distributed by a setup package made in Visual Studio 2005. If you saw Cassini 1.1 prerequisite on some of our screenshots, we apologize for the confusion: Cassini 1.1 prerequisite was an internal experiment with the prerequisite technology and did not make into the final product. We thought that Cassini 1.1 will be disitributed predominantly by packages made in Visual Studio .NET 2003 - where there is no concept of prerequisites, and therefore we decided that there was no need for Cassini 1.1 prerequisite in Visual Studio 2005. Also, some of our screenshots show ".NET Framework 1.1" prerequisite among others. That too is something we made for internal use, and never released to general public as something we thought is not very useful and potentially violating MS license agreement - for some inexplicable reason they don't like installers automatically downloading .NET Framework 1.1 from their web site.

We would like to provide you some workaround options though. With Framework 1.1 iteself it is technically not so hard for us because we do have (an unreleased) product that creates ".NET Framework 1.1 prerequisite", but from the legal standpoint it may be a problem. It may not be completely unreasonable to make presence of .NET Framework 1.1 a software requirement for your product because most of Windows PCs already have it. With making Cassini 1.1 a prerequisite the million dollar question is whether you are going to make the bootstrapper download prerequisite components from the web or from a CD. If it's CD then we could make a prerequisite manifest for you and provide instructions on how to make a Cassini 1.1 Prerequisite manually. But if you need to distribute your package over the web then on top of it we would have to host Cassini 1.1 components on our internet servers and make it available for the lifetime of your application, which is quite a tall order. Please let us know about how you intend to distribute your application: on internet or on CD, and we'll do our best to help you with your case. Outside of that the only other option would be to make two separate setup packages: one for ASP.NET application, and another and for 2.0 WinForms app, and have a BAT script that will kick them off one after another.

To answer your other questions, during programmatic registration of ASP.NET application with Cassini target framework version is determined by the runtime version the regisration routine is running under. This means that when registration API finds itself running inside 1.1 Framework - it registers 1.1 as a target platform. The same goes for 2.0.

All the best wishes,
UltiDev Team.

Hi there!

Actually, it's a good news and good news. The issue with uncertain target Framework version can be resolved relatively easily. If worse comes to worst, you can always fall back on the Cassini Configuration API, which resides in the "c:\Program Files\UltiDev\Cassini Web Server for ASP.NET 1.1\UltiDevCassiniServerConfiguration.dll" and lets you force any given framework version setting down Cassini's throat.

You could do that in additional custom build step right after the application registration. To create the custom action you would need to add a reference to UltiDevCassiniServerConfiguration.dll and add an Installer class to any of the non-web application projects in the solution (or add a new class library project), override Install method and put something like this in it:

Then add the project where your Installer class resides as a custom action step in the Install sequence and you are all set.

However, before you do all this please make sure that you really have to. The thing is, if you use UltiDevCassiniServerConfiguration.dll from the Cassini 1.1 set for the registration and unregistration steps as they described in the Cassini Developer's Guide, there is a chance MS Installer will run it inside the Framework 1.1. We are not sure what determines which version of the Framework gets instantiated by the MS Installer. It could be version of CLR the UltiDevCassiniServerConfiguration.dll was built for, which would be great if it is becasue none of the custom programming described above would be required. But the version of CLR may also be detemined by the version of Visua Studio used to build a setup package. If so, the stuff described easlier in this post will be required.

Since regular application registration step will be required anyway, please just strat with the standard registration routine as described in the Cassini Developer's Guide. If you check the Cassini Explorer after the installation and see that your app is registered for CLR 2.0, then prceed to adding (or replacing altogether the standard registration) with the extra installation step that will adjust target CLR version.

Regarding the instructions on how to create a Visual Studio 2005 prerequisite for UltiDev Cassini 1.1, we'll pu it in the next post as we need a little bit of time to put it together.

Regards,
UltiDev Team.