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If you are reading this post in RSS feed reader, then I think you should visit this post on the blog. I have now hosted blog at new place. I owe a big Thank to WordPress for providing me great services for over two years. I believe that wordpress is the most powerful yet simple blogging service of all. I wanted to move to new hosting provider on the first day of 2008 but somehow couldn't make it. I have now migrated all the blog with posts and comments.

I have more things to add to this place now. I will keep you posted about that in coming days. I am even going to put another blog (personal) for my personal, friends and family updates. You can find that here.

More is coming on the way.

I am a newbie to .Net based development. I have been working on a project which involves web services, client / server applications and web applications. For a guy who spent more than 5 years in Java, this is not new but the environment change is definitely painful. In my developer life, I have kept switching between development environments. I tried Ubuntu, Red Hat Linux, Windows (98/Me/XP/Vista) and Solaris (for a little while). Whenever I used to switch the platform, I never felt too much pain as Java IDE support is great on many platforms. You don't need to worry about platform specific things and the web server / application servers behaves exactly same on all the platforms (except the file separators)!

Enough with my rant about .Net. Lets come to the point.

Today, I was trying to create virtual directories using Nant in IIS. My environment details are as follows:

• Windows Vista Business Edition
• IIS 7 installed with default options.

Now with above environment, when I fire the command which creates virtual directories. I got following console output:

E:\Blah>tools\nant\NAnt.exe -buildfile:Blah.build makeVDir

NAnt 0.85 (Build 0.85.2344.0; rc4; 02/06/2006)

Copyright (C) 2001-2006 Gerry Shaw

http://nant.sourceforge.net

Buildfile: file:///E:/Blah/Blah.build

 Target framework: Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0

 Target(s) specified: makeVDir

[loadtasks] Scanning assembly "NAnt.Contrib.Tasks" for extensions.

[loadtasks] Scanning assembly "DBUpdaterTask" for extensions.

[script] Scanning assembly "4cliemw_" for extensions.

makeVDir:

[deliisdir] Deleting virtual directory 'Blah.WebServices'
            on 'localhost:80' (website: ).
[deliisdir] The webservice at 'localhost' does not exist
            or is not reachable.
[deliisdir] Deleting virtual directory 'BlahService' on
            'localhost:80' (website: ).
[deliisdir] The webservice at 'localhost' does not exist or
            is not reachable.
[mkiisdir] Creating/modifying virtual directory 'Blah.WebServices'
           on 'localhost:80' (website: ).

BUILD FAILED - 2 non-fatal error(s), 0 warning(s)

The webservice at 'localhost' does not exist or is not reachable.

Total time: 0.8 seconds.

Some Invisible Text

I googled for it and didn't found anything useful. I saw posts here and here with no information or solutions. Fortunately, I got this working and thought to make a post about it.I tried following things and I am listing them all.

• My machine was referring to localhost as "::1" which is a IPv6 address. I went ahead and commented that in %windows%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts and kept localhost pointing to "127.0.0.1".
• I also forcefully edited the "Default" website binding in IIS Manager to 127.0.0.1 which was previously to "All Unassigned".
• Last thing I tried was (and this made my installation really work) was installing additional IIS Features. By default IIS in windows vista installs features which doesn't allow Nant to register webservices or create virtual directories. So I went ahead and installed all the features under IIS installation in windows vista. The screenshot is attached below.

I think even the Nant message is little misleading. I got this thing working by just trial and error. I am still investigating exactly what is going wrong behind the scenes. If anybody already know please update the comments or I will post them when I find root cause.

ThoughtWorks is holding a Gaming tournament in Pune office. The event is open for all interested gamers. The event details and registration details are available here. The event is having limited spots and its invitation based. So hurry up and get signed up for the same.

The idea of the tournament is to select winner across three categories of games. The three categories are arcade (Need for Speed), strategy (Age of Empires) and action (Counter Strike). Based on the nature of games, the teams or individuals will compete against each other to get the winning spot. If you feel you're ready for burning some rubber, conquering territories or saving hostages please do drop by the official site and register yourself.

For any questions or queries, you can contact me at "sachin" at thoughtworks dot com