This is another article that detours quite a bit from SQL, but I've found it
useful enough at work that I wanted to share.
I'm a big advocate of having developers code locally so that they can make
whatever changes they want without waiting on anyone. Even on a development
server you end up needing someone to coordinate changes and that slows things
down. The SQL part is easy to handle, have them install Personal Edition or
Developer Edition of SQL 2000 (licensed appropriately) and you're in business.
If you're doing web development it's not quite that easy, Windows XP Pro (and
Win2K I think) only support one web site.
Well, sorta. You can have more than one, but only use one at a time. You can
do some stuff with the adsutil.vbs to control the sites manually, but it's well,
ugly. I ran across a small utility that does the same thing (a wrapper I
imagine, but I'm not sure) that is freeware called IIS Admin. Note that as far
as I can tell you're not violating any license by doing this. You're still only
able to have one active web site at a time and I believe their intent was to not
allow a box running XP Pro to act as a production web server.
You can download it from here.
No support, but you can request the source code if you need it. In practice I've
had no issues with it and even had it work when other methods failed us at work.
It runs in the tray, here is that it looks like running on my dev box at home:
Exactly what I want in a tool. Takes something painful and makes it easy!
