Lightswitch 2012 and Windows XP

Question

i finally finished a proyect i was requested in my university with Lightswitch. Im ready to deploy (publish) next week, and i was JUST told that the people that will recieve the software, are using XP machines. I've read a lot of questions and lots of fixes, to get Lightswitch working on Windows XP, like:

• Changing the DumpBin with "editbin vslshost.exe /SUBSYSTEM:WINDOWS,5.01 /OSVERSION:5.1"

• deploy it as a desktop application with the services deployed to IIS (i dont think this will work because those are really old pc's)

• install all the prerequisites manually and launch the ClickOnce application directly from deployment manifest file (.application)

• create a sample ClickOnce application using Visual Studio 2010 OR Visual Studio 2008 with the same name as mentioned in Visual Studio 2012 and publish it. From the published location take the setup.exe bootstrapper and replace the existing setup.exe bootstrapper created using Visual Studio 2012

With all of this workarounds available, i NEED to ask, will this ultimately work? Can someone REALLY tell me that using one-or-all of this workarounds i WILL be able to deploy the application!? Someone?

Answer 1

I have a successfully deployed application using the 3-tiers running as an out-of-browser (desktop app) on XP. Initially I was going to do the 2-tier deployment, but I was unable to get a workaround to work.

So I have one server, which runs IIS as well as my SQL server (OS is Windows Server 2003, but doesn't have to be.) The client machines range from Windows XP to Windows 7, and I haven't had any special problems with windows XP.

So I can definitely say XP will work as a client. I was unable to get it to run the middle tier (hence IIS on the server) but I didn't try every last idea I found, so I won't say it's impossible.

The two links I found most helpful in the process were http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bethmassi/archive/2011/03/23/deployment-guide-how-to-configure-a-web-server-to-host-lightswitch-applications.aspx and http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bethmassi/archive/2012/03/29/lightswitch-iis-deployment-enhancements-in-visual-studio-11.aspx

Hope that helps.

Answer 2

The 2-Tier Deployment issue on XP was also addressed in VS 2012 Update 2 IF you upgrade to a "V3" LightSwitch project by right-clicking on the root project in Solution Explorer and selecting "Upgrade Project". This updates the project to the "V3" project system, runtime and will use a much newer publish wizard. The version of VSLSHOST.exe that ships with VS 2012 Update 2 is compatible with XP.

Dave Kidder - LightSwitch team

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/profile/dave%20kidder/