Having VISTA is good, cool and it very stable but it is not designed to work with developers, this is especially true of VS2003 developers. There is a lot and I mean a lot of .NET 1.X code out there to be supported for at least the next 10 years. Anyone thinks they are all going to be writing and supporting new stuff .NET 2.0+ then they might get good luck.
So on to the getting Vs2003 working with Vista.
If you have installed Vs2005 or VS2008 then you may have to remove then you may well have to remove them and install in order VS2003 --> VS2005 --> VS2008 sorry but this is a common issue. This method worked with for me but I suspect others will need different tweaks.
1) Install IIS on Vista.
2) Install the .NET FrameWork 1.1, VISTA only seems to support 1.0 Classic .NET for support out the box (what the.....).
3) Install .NET 1.1 service pack 1
4) Open IIS Management ; I tried all sorts of different combinations and the only one that seemed to work well was deleting the default website and creating a new one using the Classic .NET Pool. Using the ASPNET 1.1 pool would seem that one to use but this didn't work for me.
Notes:
You may have to run VS2003 as administrator
You will not be able to debug in VS2003; I am trying to find a fix for this but its being quietly ignored in someplaces.
You can browse to your localhost to view your websites. This is far from ideal but it can be done.
Alternative:
Install virtual PC and create an XP partition.
