I have managed to work around the issue of not having mod_rewrite on my IIS hosting account. Since I can use by ASP.NET and PHP on a single site, I took advantage of the free UrlRewriter library and web.config settings. It’s actually pretty cool.  I have a new Health & Fitness Clickbank Mall site create that is all done using PHP, but I use a web.config file along with UrlRewriter to handle correctly rewriting URLs. The funky thing is that all of the URLs look like they are for aspx files, but they are actually all served up by my index.php file.  It may not be ideal or pretty, but it sure seems to work!

Once again I have run smack into the reality that no hosting provider is perfect. While I have been quite happy with my Windows based DailyRazor hosting account I have just discovered an issue that is really bumming me out.  With DailyRazor I can use both PHP and ASP.NET on my sites, which is very cool. I created a new subdomain and developed the site using PHP.  I created a .htaccess file and put in my rewrite commands. When I ran it, however, the rewrite wasn’t working at all. The thing I forgot about is that mod_rewrite is specific to Apache and not PHP.  Since my site is running on IIS there is no mod_rewrite. 

So, I did some research. I did find an IIS addon product called IIS Mod-Rewrite from MicroNovae that looks promising.  I contact DailyRazor support to see if they had anything already installed or suggestions.  Unfortunately they weren’t much help. They said I could buy a license to IIS Mod-Rewrite and they would install it for me (which is certainly a decent option, but I’m not sure I want to buy the license and risk there being issues on a server I can’t administer myself).

I am considering another option, but need to really think it through to see if it would actually work.  I have some ASP.NET sites that are using a free URL Rewriter product. It works pretty good and does the same basic things that mod_rewrite does.  Since I can mix and match PHP and ASP.NET on my sites, I’m thinking I could use that ASP.NET URL rewriter product (which is configured via web.config) to do what I need.  I’m keeping my fingers crossed!

It’s probably not fair to compare Microsoft Visual Studio to Eclipse. Visual Studio, for example, is a full fledged product from Microsoft that is supported and comes with a hefty price tag.  Eclipse, on the other hand, is an open source tool that is support by the community and is free for all to use.  The reason I think it’s fair to do some amount of comparison is because Eclipse gets positioned in the marketplace as a tool that can do all that Visual Studio can. So, they brought this on themselves.

I’ve been using Visual Studio for over 10 years. It has gone through several upgrades as the Microsoft programming languages and technologies have evolved from Visual Basic and C++ to C# and VB.NET. The tool is extremely stable.  I’m not using the current version - Visual Studio 2008 - and can’t recall it ever crashing or locking up. While most people think of Visual Studio as only being used for Microsoft programming languages, Visual Studio is an extensible tool. For example, you can do PHP programming in Visual Studio using VS.Php from jcxSoftware. Want to do Ruby programming? No problem, check out Ruby in Steel.  In some cases there is an additional cost for the Visual Studio add-on, but in other cases it is free.  My point is that you can use a very stable, proven development tool like Visual Studio to do more than just Microsoft development.

My experience with Eclipse is limited compared to Visual Studio. I first started using Eclipse about a year ago when I expanded my horizons to develop with PHP.  I considered using VS.Php add-on to Visual Studio but confess that I was cheap and didn’t want to spend any money at the time since I wasn’t sure I’d stick with PHP. After doing a lot of searching and research I decided to go with Eclipse and use a free PHP plugin. Considering everything was free I must say it worked pretty good.  The Eclipse workspace was similar in structure to Visual Studio so the learning curve was minimal. The PHP programming was pretty good and included intellisense. There were some quirky things with auto formatting, but overall a good experience. As I started to use it more, however, I began to run into stability issues.  If I left Eclipse running for the day it would often end up crashing. I ended up installing the more recent version to see if that would help but it really didn’t.  Different issues, but still not as stable as Visual Studio.

There’s an old saying - “You get what you pay for” - and that holds true for Visual Studio and Eclipse.  If you want professional grade development then spend the money and stick with Visual Studio. If you’re looking for a decent, free development environment then give Eclipse a look.