Metallica Setlists Database in ASP.NET

The following is a step-by-step guide on deploying the Metallica Setlists Database on your machine.
This guide was written by Brian Johnson for CISC-474 Spring 2006.  Links are current as of May 16, 2006.

Install Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Professional

1. As a member of the University of Delaware community, you can obtain a free academic version of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Professional. To do this, go to www.cis.udel.edu and click the MSDNAA subscription link near the bottom of the page.
    
2. You should be directed to the MSDN Academic Alliance Software Center page.  From here, click the Login button.  You can log in using your University of Delaware EECIS account (same account you use to login to porsche.cis.udel.edu).  Everyone in CISC-474 should already have an EECIS account.
    
3. After successfully logging in, click the blue button at the top of the page that says Software.  You will want to download the following products:
   • Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition CD1
   • Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition CD2
   You can find them by using the Search dialog box, or you can select them from the drop-down list box that contains all the available software titles. Follow the instructions on the web site to complete the download.
    
4. Once you have completed the download, you should have two .ISO files named "en_vs_2005_pro_cd1.iso" and "en_vs_2005_pro_cd1.iso".  The next step is to make 2 CD-R discs from these .ISO files.  If you're not sure how to do this, you can read these instructions.
    
5. Next, insert CD1 into your CD-ROM drive and begin installing the software.  Follow the on-screen instructions to complete the installation.

Install Web Application Project Updates

1. By default, Visual Studio 2005 does not support web application projects.  To enable web application projects, download and install the Visual Studio 2005 - Update to Support Web Application Projects. See this Microsoft knowledge base article for more information.
    
2. Next, download and install the Visual Studio 2005 Web Applications Project Model.
    

Download and Install the Metallica Setlists Database

1. Download the ZIP file containing all of the code.
    
2. Unzip the files to a directory on your machine. I would suggest the following directory:
   • C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Projects
   Where %username% is your Windows login name.
    
3. Run Microsoft Visual Studio 2005.  From the File menu, choose Open Project.  Select the following file:
   • C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Projects\Metallica\Metallica.sln
      
4. In the Solution Explorer, double-click the web.config file to open it.  You will need to update ALL INSTANCES of the connection strings so that they point to the correct location of metallica.mdf.  The default connection string is as follows:
   • connectionString="Data Source=.\SQLEXPRESS;AttachDbFilename="C:\Documents and Settings\BJ\My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Projects\Metallica\Metallica\metallica.mdf";Integrated Security=True;Connect Timeout=30;User Instance=True"
      

   For example, to install this under the pconrad directory under "Documents and Settings" you might do a global find/replace, replacing \BJ\ with \pconrad\, given that the original username when Brian Johnson created the application was BJ.

5. Now, press Ctrl + F5 to compile and run the program.  Microsoft Visual Studio should start an ASP.NET development server on your machine, and open your web browser to the default page (Index.aspx).
    
6. If you receive any build errors or run time errors, check to make sure your connection strings are set up appropriately.
    

Working with the database

Troubleshooting Tips

If you get the error message shown below, it probably means your connection strings aren't correct. Brian says: "sometime Visual Studio seems to like to change them on you, so you might fix one of these, and then it mysteriously reappears. Basically, the default way to create a database in ASP.NET is to create a database in a certain directory under the project structure, and I didn't know to do that, so I didn't do it. So, Visual Studio won't revert to looking under \BJ\, but it might revert to looking under that default directory."