Comtaste Consulting | Enterprise RIA consulting and development

Weborb for .NET is one of the best platform to connect Flex, Flash, AJAX and Silverlight clients with .NET objects, XML Web Services, native operating system resources and rich media streams (audio and video). In this post I will show you how to install and start up this platform on XP Professional with IIS 6.0.
First of all you have to install .NET 2.0 Framework on yours machines, following the steps below :

- open a Dos Shell
-go to the directory that contains .NET 2.0 installation files ( usually is C:\WINDOWS
\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727).
- Execute the command: aspnett_regiis -i

After this operation you can proceed with the weborb installation.

In order to download WEBORB platform from MIDNIGHT CODERS web site, you have to register yourself (it is FREE!) and after this you will be able to save WeborbSetup3.6.0.3.zip file on your computer. Now you have to unzip that file and run setup; after few seconds you are ready to test your WEBORB Installation.

Now open your browser and go to http:\\localhost\weborb30. At this address you can find the start page of WEBORB .NET platform.

First of all you can see a lot of example of what you can do with this platform in the section “Example” of the main Menu, but one of the most interest function is the Deployment. In this section you can create your server-side application in two different ways:

The first way is to automatically deploy weborb library in an IIS Virtual directory. It is very simple, in fact is enough to drag and drop the virtual directory from the list on the left to the list on the right, and, after a few seconds, you will have all the configurations files ready in the destination directory.

The second way is to deploy manually the weborb library following the steps below:

-Copy the following files/folders from the default Weborb installation directory to the
corresponding folders in the target virtual directory:

/Licenses/weborblicense.key.config
/bin/weborb.dll (main WebORB assembly)
   /bin/Npgsql.dll (a database driver used by WebORB Data Management)
   /bin/MySql.Data.dll (a database driver used by WebORB Data Management)
   /bin/Mono.Security.dll (a database driver used by WebORB Data Management)
   /weborb.config (product configuration file)
   /weborbee.exe (WebORB Enterprise Edition standalone server)
   /weborbee.exe.config (WebORB Enterprise Edition executable config)
   /Applications (WebORB messaging applications home)
   /Global.asax (includes WebORB messaging server startup and shutdown code. Merge the
contents if the file already exists)
   /diagnostics.aspx (product diagnostics utility)
   /WEB-INF (Flex configuration files home)
   /weborbassets (Code generator stylesheets home)
   /services (WebORB web services, contains backend support for WDMF plugin for Flex Builder)
   /weborb.js (required only for the AJAX clients)

- Add the following XML configuration to web.config in the target virtual directory:

<configuration>
<system.web>
<httpHandlers>
<add verb="*" path="weborb.aspx" type="Weborb.ORBHttpHandler"/>
<add verb="*" path="codegen.aspx" type= "Weborb.Management.CodeGen.CodegeneratorHttpHandler"/>
</httpHandlers>
</system.web>
</configuration>

- Grant Write permission to the user account ASP.NET uses for the following files and directories:

   /weborb.config (required only if making configuration changes from the console)
   /logs (required only if logging is enabled)
   /weborbassets/codegen (required only if codegen is used in the console)
   /weborbassets/uploads
   /weborbassets/wdm
   /weborbassets/wdm/output
   /*.mdb (required only if writing data back on the server in some examples)

Another very important function in the main menu is Management where you can test our remote components without any dedicated client application!

Next time I will show you a small example with a Flex client.