Getting ASP.NET 2.0 to run on IIS 6 is not just a case of installing the .NET redistributable package. You have to add the ASP.NET 2.0 web service extension under IIS 6.0 and then allow it to execute ASP.NET 2.0.

Another thing that some people seem to have confused is that ASP.NET 3.5 is not enabled under IIS. ASP.NET 3.5 is built on top of ASP.NET 2.0 and extends 2.0. There is no ASP.NET 3.5 under IIS. Its also interesting to note that the .NET 3.5 redistributable includes EVERYTHING. The 3.5 redistributable package is a hefty 197MB download and contains everything needed to build ASP.NET applications up to version 3.5.

Silverlight is a mime type that you have to add to IIS 6 for Silverlight websites to work, and configuring IIS 6 for Silverlight is as simple as adding three mime types.

So I noticed that my site had an incoming link (the WordPress dashboard shows this) and I clicked on that link and came across this site where they have an exact copy of one of my articles. On the same site I clicked through to the WordPress blog and saw that they have updated their theme directory. The theme directory seems to contain a few nice looking themes and one in particular seems cool, and I have decided to use it. Its called Amazing Grace and worked well the first time. Its interesting to see that WordPress 2.6 now creates a little theme preview window. Nice touch.

Silverlight is not a very mature implementation but the technologies it uses for that implementation aren’t new or unknown. Sure, you have to download a plugin to view Silverlight content, but other than that the technologies that are used in Silverlight are not new. Flash uses ActionScript which closely resembles JavaScript and wonder above wonder Silverlight 1.0 and 1.1 uses JavaScript. Silverlight does use a technology set called XAML, but then again XAML looks and feels like XML. XML is not a new technology either. With Silverlight 2.0 you can use .NET Programming Languages such as C#. Again C# is not a new technology, and even though it has been around for less than 10 years its syntax is strikingly similar to Java and C++, which have been around for longer. Where is all of this coming from? Well in the week, Friday, to be exact I tested a Silverlight 1.x application on a local Intranet. I wanted to see what difficulties users might end up with if required to download the plugin. I sent the URL to a few developers and asked them to test it for me and one question that came back was “How long has this Silverlight technology been around?”, which got me thinking. Silverlight as an implementation is new, yes, but its underlying technology is not. There will be issues with the implementation, as with many technology sets, but the key for me as a developer is that I will be able to take my JavaScript, C#, XML and database skills and be able to build on them with this new technology. From a designer’s perspective Silverlight will not introduce any new technology sets either, because all the graphics elements used within WPF and Silverlight are Vector-based. The graphics elements are represented as XAML and interestingly enough you can export Adobe Illustrator files as XAML and import that directly into Expression Blend and Visual Studio 2008. Personally I think that shows great interoperability.

The point though is that in today’s development environment technology maturity may only point to an implementation specific issue, not a technology subset. The technology subsets that an implementation is focussed on will in all likelihood be a mature technology already.