XNA, Managed DirectX and Game Programming

Customizing Community Server 2007 - Setup

I started playing around with Coding and customising Community server a bit last night. In the beginning I was using the Demo Application that you can download from the communityserver.org homepage. This worked well, I used Visual Studio to compile the assembly I was working on then transferred the compiled code to the bin directory in the Demo site, made the configuration changes for the work I was doing and off it went with out a problem.

But it looks like I have the bug and I want to make some more changes, looking at what I need to do I have decided to use the SDK to do my work in. When using the SDK you need to make sure that you have the web projects plug-in for visual studio 2005, and the system needs you to be connected to a Database server as well as an IIS Server. With my system I wanted to make it portable so that I can work from home and at work on the same system and configuration.

To do this I decided to have a look if I could remove the need for the web projects, Database and IIS Server. This in the end was a little bit of work but it works and I am now off and running. What I did was remove the web project from the project and rename it to Web_Old. Then inside Visual studio I removed the web project from the solution and added a new web site to the system. Next I copied the Old Web directory into this new web directory (I needed to make sure that the Web site I added was created use a directory called web under the source directory for the SDK).

The next stage was to ad the database, for this I added an App_Data Directory to the web site and created a new database inside, then I ran the create database script for a fresh install. The next step was to change the configuration for the database connection strings. In the demo app the connection string was stored in the web.config file, but in the production/sdk system it is stored in a new config file called connectionstrings.config.

In the end after all this was done, I now have a version of the sdk that does not need the Web Projects Add-on for visual studio 2005, used the sql server express database running in a user instance mode, and no longer needs to use the IIS Server as it uses the internal one supplied with visual studio 2005.