It's ALIVE

After only 3 failed installations I finally have an EPiServer CMS 5 demo site up and running - hurray!

I learnt quite a few things while completing this installation.

First of all you can install the site using either the EPiServer manager install (like we're used to with EPiServer 4.*) or by using the extensions within studio to create a new project. I found the EPiServer manager install more useful this time around as it installs some sample templates. For future projects a clean install through studio will be beneficial.

The EPiServer manager install can fail a few times and the forums are a good place to find resolutions to problems during this step. My issues were due to dll access (not rolling back completely after a failed install) and sql server 2005 problems. A very common error is remote connections not enabled:

An error has occurred while establishing a connection to the server. When connecting to SQL Server 2005, this failure may be caused by the fact that under the default settings SQL Server does not allow remote connections.

For this issue you need to configure remote connections within the Surface Area Configuration Tool. The following is a good resource: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/914277

This documentation (http://www.episerver.com/en/EPiServer_Knowledge_Center/Documentation/Release-Notes-CMS-Beta/EPiServer-CMS-5-RC1-Revised-Documentation/Setting-Up-a-New-EPiServer-Site-with-Visual-Studio/) details how to set an episerver site with visual studio. If you install the site through the manager you can skip the first few steps although you will want to make sure your project and solution are all created and compiling correctly at this point.
The documentation is also available within the SDK. The EPiServer CMS 5 SDK can be found within your Start/All Programs if you have used the sdk installation package.

From here you can follow the documentation on Creating Roles and Users in the above link.

Note: there is one important thing missing from the documentation. Before you create the roles and users you need to run the ASP .NET SQL Server Registration Tool - Aspnet_regsql.exe (see http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229862(vs.80).aspx). This will allow you to install the database elements for the membership and role management. There has been mention that you can install your users and roles anywhere but for ease in your demo site I suggest installing on your demo database.

Once the reg tool has been run you can follow the steps to create the roles and users.

With all the hard setup parts done you can now login using sitename/util/login.aspx and the user you just created. I had a few configuration issues at this point. One of them was I had to have the entry applicationId="/LM/W3SVC/10/Root" as an attribute of my site tag:

site applicationId="/LM/W3SVC/10/Root" description="Example Site"

Afterwards, the site compiled correctly, I could login to admin and edit modes and I finally had a working demo site to play with.

- Workflow foundation, themes and role management here I come :)