ASP.NET has specific requirements regarding operating system and web servers; namely, it runs only Microsoft's own IIS (Internet Information Server), which is not available on Windows XP Home. Since my Compaq laptop comes only with XP Home, and not willing to risk getting busted with an illegal copy of XP Professional, I've spent the last few months looking for an alternative to IIS.
For a while, I did my ASP.NET development on an XP Pro virtual machine running on top of my XP Home using VMWare Workstation. This was fine for writing simple web apps for the sake of learning, but serving a full website on a virtual machine was never going to be feasible.
So I looked elsewhere, perhaps a webserver software that had ASP.NET capabilities. Since XP Home does not have IIS, I had to use third-party software anyway. I decided to use Apache 2.0.52 for serving regular HTML, while giving Mono and their XSP webserver a shot. When I tried starting nGallery on XSP, however, the server appeared to be buggy and unstable.
More recently, the Apache CLI Project has come out with the mod_aspdotnet module for their Apache server. I'm currently running this module, which at the moment only supports .NET Framework 1.1. It appears to run ASP.NET web apps without problems; installation and configuration are not the most straightforward, but it's a price you pay for highly configurable software.
The only remaining obstacle is Visual Studio's inability to create web app projects due to XP Home's lack of IIS. At this time I can write individual ASP.NET pages but not an entire project in Visual Studio. Will need some sort of workaround for this.
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You can use Webmatrix or Cassini (the server used by Webmatrix) on XP Home. Or try Mono's XSP again. Mono is improving very fast. A new version is due out soon.
Thanks to whoever made the above comment. As I noted in the ASP.NET - Final Solution post, I'm currently using Web Matrix for learning purposes. The problem with Web Matrix and Cassini remains that it only serves locally. I will periodically check up on Mono, but for the moment Apache's CLI Project looks a better bet if you're willing to do configuration in a text file.
I tried nGallery with Apache + mod_aspdotnet but encoutered some problems. E.g.
[Mon Feb 28 15:14:18 2005] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] File does not exist: C:/Playground/nGallery/web/photos/1/1/140x105
.aspx, referer: http://localhost/nGallery/admin/albumDetails.aspx?albumID=1
Some configuration functionalities are fine, though. Did you actually have the nGallery up and running with Apache?
Regarding the above comment: no, I don't have nGallery running with Apache + mod_aspdotnet. I'm trying to write my own code for a simple photo album using an MSDE database. I didn't try nGallery again after installing mod_aspdotnet, so I'm sorry I can't really help you out there. :-(
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