Up and running on Windows Server 2008

Well I just recently rebuilt my Power Laptop (Dell XPS 1710) on to Windows Server 2008. Why, you may ask? BECAUSE I CAN!!! Not really, I wanted to try and give the Hyper-V components a whirl and try out some of those features.

However one problem I did come across after getting Windows Server 2008 installed, was that the Windows Live Installers would not run on Windows Server 2008, so no Live Messenger and no Live Writer.

Lucky enough I finally found a supported installer for Live Messenger at https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=D78F2FF1-79EA-4066-8BA0-DDBED94864FC&displaylang=en.

It was the Live Writer component that was a little trickier as there was no other installer that would support the Windows Server 2008 environment. Finally I found a blog from Daniel Larson, that helped out with it all. When you think about it the solution makes so much sense, and in a way where the deployment of .NET applications are managed so easily.

Because Live Writer is a .NET application, you are able to essentially copy the directory of Live Writer from a machine that it is working on, and then copy it to a location on your Windows Server 2008 machine.

Run the .exe, and away you go...

So where am I blogging from... my Live Writer running on Windows Server 2008 of course :-).

Hope this helps someone.