>Hi Roxanne....
>
>PWS in IIS 4 is a lot closer to the real thing than the earlier version of PWS. Although - for testing - PWS has always been pretty good. The most important issue is memory. If you are going to work with this stuff - you need plenty of memory. Also, you really need to be working with NT WorkStation.
PWS 95 and PWS on NT 4.0 are two totally different beasts. The PWS on Win95 is pretty much the old PWS 1.0/3.0 engine wrapped up with a new interface. It doesn't support ActiveDirectory Administration (the IIS Metabase) nor does it support most of the settings that IIS 4 allows (it uses the old IIS 3 settings in the registry).
PWS on WinNT is basically a full version of IIS with a dumbed down front end
that doesn't let you do *anything*. You can't administer the interface beyond
creating virtual directories. However, because it's really IIS under the hood
all the Metabase settings are available and can be set programmatically
(or via a metabase editor which is part of the NT Resource kit, but doesn't
install for me - thank MS).
For basic development either one of the PWS servers will be fine. However,
I really hate the inability to control settings on these servers. Various
installs make control settings that you don't have access to (including
Web Connection
it's the only way to do it) visually.
PWS on Win95 is very unstable in my experience. It crashes constantly and
is very slow. The UI portion of it is the worst part for crashing.
Finally keep in mind licensing issues. MS is providing PWS mainly as a
development tool and so you can run Web enabled applications locally, but not
to let you use PWS as a Web server to server content to other users. Both
versions of PWS have a 10 user connection limit (in writing, not physically),
so using it as a public or even department Web server is pretty much in
violation of the license agreement.
+++ Rick ---
