As I mentioned in a previous post, I am currently in the process of switching to a One and One dedicated Windows 2008 x64 Server. I was trying to work out how to set up FrontPage Server Extensions, which I’m not a big fan of, but I do find them very useful for editing remote sites directly through Visual Studio and my life would be a lot more difficult without them. The problem is, I couldn’t find any reference to FrontPage Server Extensions anywhere in IIS7.
After a bit of research, I found that Microsoft no longer support FrontPage Server Extensions in Windows Server 2008 as they have replaced it with WebDAV, which seems technically much better. The problem is that WebDAV isn’t supported directly by Visual Studio (please sort that out Microsoft!), so the only way of using that is to use WebDAV Redirector so that you can map a network drive for the folder and then access the network drive from Visual Studio. This is not really a practical solution for me as I would have dozens of sites to keep track of and I don’t have the patience to remap them when I need them or keep track of so many different drive letters!
A quick hunt around online for an alternateive gave me Ready to Run Software’s site, which frankly looks suprisingly unprofessional if you believe that they are actually working with Microsoft. I don’t know whether they are or not, but they do seem to be the sole supplier of a ported version of FrontPage Server Extensions for Windows Server 2008.
All credit to them, their port of it does seem to work, although I did get an error “unable to read configuration for Microsoft Internet Information service” when I tried to install it, but their FAQ deals with that. I managed to get it working, although it is a real pain in the neck that you have to be logged in as Administrator and not just an administrator!
The problem I had was managing the FrontPage settings for the website itself – I wanted to add another user. I couldn’t seem to log in to the site admin – it wouldn’t authenticate me whatever username I used or whoever I made the web administrator. The only solution I found was to use owsadm.exe, which took a bit of hunting around for how to do it.
First of all, I found it in C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\microsoft shared\Web Server Extensions\50\bin\
Secondly, I needed to work out how to call it. It isn’t very well documented, but you need to do something like this…
owsadm -o roleusers -c add -u username -m domainname -web /subweb -name Admin
replace username and domainname as appropriate, and /subweb with the path to the subweb that you want to add the user to. That can just be / for the root web. You can replace Admin if you don’t want to use the administrative role for your new user. I’m not sure what the other role names are.