Hallelujah! Dev'Garten is home and hosed!

For those who have been following my little Dev’Garten project, part of the vision was to have a hosted ASP.NET 2.0 sand box for people to use to get a feel for ASP.NET 2.0 in the cloud. This hosting infrastructure is also where the Team Foundation Server Application Tier will be deployed, so I needed to get it running ASAP.

Now, Intel supplied the hardware, and WDG hosted the box, but I had to do the spooning (for those who have never heard this term, it’s developer slang for a network engineer…don’t ask why!!).

I had to work out how to support a web application box, a database server box, an Active Directory box, and a monitoring box; so I went Virtual Server 2005 R2! The trick was setting up an ISA Server 2004 virtual instance to front end the internal network of web, database, AD, and monitoring boxen.

Now, when you connect to www.devgarten.com, you’re not hitting a static HTML page as was the case before, you are now passing through ISA Server 2004 to an internal virtual server instance of IIS 6.0 running ASP.NET 2.0!!! Yes! Yes! Yes!

I’ll be upgrading www.devgarten.com over the next 6 months to include some cool bits of functionality for getting yourself an ASP.NET 2.0 sand box for a trial period, and also putting in some other bits and pieces. I will also be putting together a presentation on how I configured it all and getting that onto Channel 9 at some stage. Keep your eye out over the next few days for a chance to play with my hosted Team Foundation Server in the cloud!!!

I’m off for a ride now :)