7 Jan: Can I run ASP on XP Home Edition?

Frustratingly, you won't find that answer on Microsoft's web sites - I've looked. In fact I just finished another 90 minutes searching MSDN because I couldn't believe they wouldn't mention this.

Actually, a few weeks ago, they did mention it. It was Q310090 in the Knowledge Base if I remember correctly. Now that question has been removed from the website!

I searched for ASP - there's no mention of Windows XP in that section. In fact they mention that ASP will only run under PWS/IIS on Windows 95, Windows NT and Windows 2000. No mention of Windows 98, ME or XP at all. Ludicrous.

Searching in the IIS section I could find no mention of XP either. The XP area doesn't mention ASP, PWS or IIS, not even to say that IIS 5.1 is available under XP Professional!

I admit, there was one place I found some relevant information. Go to the very bottom of the Install: Q & A and you'll see the standard disclaimer that XP Home won't run anything. This is pretty worthless though, considering they said that about ME too, but PWS works just fine.

In conclusion, I'll have to say that if you have XP Home Edition you have to upgrade to XP Professional to do any development work. Just to dangle a carrot out there for you hackers though, I did come across this interesting snippet at Tek-Tips - I'll leave it up to you to consider whether it's worth saving your $100 upgrade for this.

This was posted in their forum - follow at your own risk!...

I was actually able to install Web server extensions on Windows XP home edition by installing IIS components from NT 5.0 beta 2 version. Now, I have a mix of files that belong to both versions. When I checked the about box for PWS, I saw version 5.1 for PWS. Everything, works OK though. It even has FTP support like all real IIS' do.

Update: Scott Mitchell of 4GuysFromRolla fame let me know about a far more detailed explanation of this "workaround", but note that I do not recommend this! Here it is.