Windows Home Server is a great OS for home users, it does a lot of stuff for you and you can find many useful plug-ins if you want more. One thing that it does not do out of the box though it does not work as a web server. It might be ok for average home user, but many advanced users, not to mention developers, would love to have their home server also serve web pages and applicatons. Fortunately, under the hood it is old good Windows server 2003, and you can make it do just about anything WS 2003 can do.

The word of caution: advanced server functionality is not supported by Microsoft and definitely it is not supported by me. This is for folks who know their way around and won’t run back crying if something goes wrong. I just document my own experience in the hope that someone else will find it useful.

To be precise, I was using Acer Aspire AH340-UA230N in my installation, but it should be identical on any WHS hardware. To get started, you’ll need to remote into your server. If your Home Server is not configured for remote access, check out this guide. Once you are able to get into what looks like normal WS 2003 desktop, things are look pretty normal. You’ll be warn about danger of messing around – you can do significant damage to default Home Server installation if you not careful. Open Internet Explorer and go download and run Web Platform Installer 2.0.

There are several choices you need to make based on functionality you want out of it. Along with ASP.NET you can install SQL server express, MVC.NET, PHP and whole bunch of applications to pick from. Don’t forget to select BlogEngine under Web Applications tab – it does not require database or MVC and will run on bare-boned ASP.NET 2.0 ;)

Installer will ask you to reboot once, so you’ll have to close remote connection and open it again to start WHS. Setup will proceed and install all required components. When it is done, you can open IIS server and verify that it looks just as one would expect: virtual directory in the web root, configured as application, all looks very familiar.

Assuming you did not get any errors and selected BlogEngine as application to be installed and named it “be”, your blog should now be available at http://your.homeserver.com/be. I believe from now on you should be able to install web applications just as you would on any standard windows server running IIS 6.0, either using Web PI or simply copying files and configuring new application in IIS.

During installation you might need to configure your router to open port 80 etc. but this is another topic not specific to WHS. All together process is pretty painless and not much different from one you would went through when using Web PI on XP or Vista. Just be extra careful and do not forget that it is Home Server after all – if in doubt about something, don’t do it! At least, bing around first to make sure it won’t break anything.

I've got email from user having issues with embedding HTML snippet into BlogEngine's page. Not really sure what was wrong with that tag, because I have never get to test it. Why? Because it is sometimes easier to add simple extension or widget than to deal with row HTML when it comes to BlogEngine. Seriously, it took me way under half an hour following steps in my own simple widget tutorial to put this together, and this is including time spent opening Disby account. More...

If you are using Picasa extension I published while back you might want to take a look at another choice and try to use HighSlide JavaScript library instead of the LightBox. Just take a look at this post by Radim Boušek and get it there along with instructions. I’ve never herd about HighSlide before, but it seems like a nice thumbnail viewer with Ajax support and more options, so give it a try.

Wrapper around standard Membership provider that ships with ASP.NET MVC 1.0 out of the box fit well common scenario for social websites with self-registration and all users treated equal. When you have more complex requirements, in portal-like style application, you are very much out of luck. Account controller that comes with MVC 1.0 has very limited user management implementation and does not go into role management at all. It would be nice to have role management implemented the same way as account management, but if you need to roll right away I’ll show you quick and dirty way of doing basic user/role management with what we have now. More...

And why they don’t take over the world. If you ever wonder about it, you probably already came up with perfectly good explanation. I’ve heard and read quite a few and agree with most of them, but still want to add my two cents. IMO, in open source there are generally two kinds of approaches. More...

Attached to this post is a small extension which is really just a proof of concept. To install it, do the regular routine: unzip and install files into corresponding locations. This is what we always do to install extension in BlogEngine. It is not hard, but requires you to have FTP client, opened port for FTP connection and, most importantly, you must have some basic administration skills. As I said nothing extra ordinary here, but still – we should not assume casual blogger comfortable doing all this little tricks. It’s a good thing most of BE users are also .NET developers ;) More...

Just finished refreshing my old DarkBlog theme to run under newest BlogEngine 1.5 release. It has been neglected for quiet some time now, I had to add widgets support, nested comments and few tweaks here and there to play nice with new features added to BlogEngine since version 1.3 when this theme was introduces. It looks pretty good with standard “welcome” post, but when tested with my own blog content, some things do not look right. Nothing is wrong with theme though, the problem is content itself - which prompted me to write a note to myself: More...

With BE.NET 1.5 release candidate out of the door, it is a good time to look at some of the new features. Most of them are small and incremental, but nevertheless are interesting. One such feature is support for compiled extensions. There are several reasons you want to compile extension rather than provide source code, such as security, protecting intellectual property, simplifying deployment (for large extensions) etc. If you find a reason to choose this route, this guide is for you. More...

Either you run your web site in the shared hosting environment or on your local IIS server, you likely have several ASP.NET applications running in the same root directory. Each of them can be configured as a separate web application and run totally independent from others. Although BlogEngine is not (yet) multi-blogging platform, you can easily run bunch of BlogEngins on the same root for number of bloggers. Lets say, you have 3 bloggers contributing to your site and you want each of them have their very own blog, then you create similar structure: More...

Feedjit is a service that provides live traffic feed for your site. It is easy to set up – you copy chunk of HTML and insert it into your blog’s markup. That is, if you know HTML and used to editing files in your blog, which shouldn’t be a requirement for average blogger. This is why popular blog providers supply Feedjit widgets – so that blogger does not have to edit files by hand and FTP them to the host. In this little exercise we create such a widget for BlogEngine. More...