My goal was to get the following components running smoothly in a virtual machine:
- Windows XP SP3
- Visual Studio 2010 Professional
- Visual WebGui 6.4 Professional
The basic install of XP and subsequent Microsoft Updates went as normal - super slow but uneventful. I used the web installer for VS 2010 and that seemed to go off without a hitch as well. The Visual WebGui install is where things got interesting.
Visual WebGui checks for a few prerequisites before installing, and it found two items missing:
- Windows Azure SDK
- Microsoft Document Explorer
Finding the Azure SDK on the Microsoft site was as simple as a quick search. The Azure SDK has a couple of prerequisites of it's own, which presented my first major hurdle: Azure SDK can only be installed on Vista, Windows 7, or Windows Server 2008.
Luckily, a few more searches revealed that the primary reason Azure requires later operating system is the version of IIS in XP is not sufficient for Azure Development & Testing. IIS7 or later is required. After a few fruitless searches, I came across my first little nugget: Web Matrix. Microsoft has included a new express version of IIS 7.5 in Web Matrix, and it run just fine on XP SP2 or later.
Having solved that issue, I tried the install of the Azure SDK again and it still complains about the Operating System. The Azure SDK is distributed as an EXE that includes the SDK and the Azure Toolkit for Visual Studio 2010. This EXE is really just a wrapper for a Windows Installer MSIs (you can find them in a new temp directory created on your C drive while looking at the message complaining about the OS level). Grab those MSI files and drop them on your Desktop. At this point, you will want to grab the Windows Installer SDK to allow modification of the MSI. I found detailed instructions by Nick Hauenstein here. Basically, you use the MsiDb.exe tool from the Installer SDK to export the Launch Requirements from the Azure MSI, edit them in Notepad to delete the OS check, and then use MsiDb.exe to import the modified text file into the Azure MSI. Unlike Nick's walk-through above, I just deleted the OS check and IIS lines and left the rest as-is -- he suggested replacing all text in the file with text on the page linked above. You will need to do this for both MSIs. NOTE: It is important to quit MsiDb between the Export and Import.
Ok, so one hurdle down. I still have the issue of Microsoft Document Explorer not being installed. A few searches turn up many reports of the install of Document Explorer failing without any visual indication. Only in the installer logs do you see it failed. Assuming this is what happened to me, I go back out to MSDN to grab the full DVD of VS2010. My guess is that somehow the web installer missed it, so I will extract the ISO and install manually. After downloading, I try to use 7-zip to extract the ISO, but all I get is a text file complaining about the UDF file structure. Let's call this a mini-hurdle. What I need to do is mount the ISO, but it is simple an ISO file sitting on a Desktop of a VM whose server is 60 miles away. No physical burning to disk today. I have used a few tools to mount ISOs in the past, but never (before today) did I realize Microsoft has one themselves. It is unsupported, but works great, and can be downloaded from this link. Follow the instructions in the README.TXT file and you will have a virtual CD drive running in no time.
Success is still managing to keep at arms length, however. After digging around the directory structure looking for the installation files for Document Explorer, and not finding any hint of it, I make another seemingly logical leap and assume that it must be buried in one of those CAB files that litter the disk. I decide to do a re-install from the DVD in hopes that this install will do better than the web installer.
So while waiting no-so-patiently for the reinstall to run, I tweak a few of my searches and discover another nugget of info that could have saved me some serious time: Document Explorer has been deprecated and is not installed with Visual Studio 2010. Evidently no one at Microsoft remembers that they have spent 5+ years mandating the use of Document Explorer to all the 3rd-party tool vendors. Once quote on a Microsoft forum essentially said 'It is a non-issue because if you have already installed Visual Studio 2008 then Document Explorer will already be there'.
Back to MSDN to download another 3 GB file for VS 2008, thankful I do not pay by the bit, unhappy I am in another sit-and-wait state. Eject the VS2010 disk, mount VS2008, and under the WCU\Dexplore folder I can see Dexplore.EXE which is the installer I have been looking for. Installed. Done.
At this point, everything is installed successfully. The Azure Storage emulator and associated services are running. The Azure Compute emulator starts, then ends for some reason -- so that will require some additional investigation. I cannot guarantee the above setup will be stable for you, but so far so good for me.
Let me know how it goes for you!