I let my frustration get the better of me when I wrote the original post, and it was definitely not the tone I'm going for, so I apologize for that. I have spent the last week or so attempting to install DNN with no success. I use google extensively and can't find exactly what's wrong. The installer certainly doesn't assist in troubleshooting as you typically get an unhandled exception for even the most commonly encountered installation issues, and it seems that if the installation doesn't go 100% perfectly, you have to wipe the directory, drop the database and start over from scratch, hopefully having corrected at least one problem that occured on the previous attempt.
I understand that an experienced installer can do it on one attempt, but there certainly seems to be a significant learning curve just to reach the point where you can install the application successfully.
I probably have somewhat of a special case. I've only read a couple of posts from people who have attempted the type of installation I'd like to do, and one was more-or-less a walkthrough of how to do it, but the walkthroughs always seem to skip a crucial step here or there that they assume you know how to do, and when things do go wrong, they don't have any quick troubleshooting guide. I want to develop DNN modules and I don't want to install IIS on my laptop but would rather use the Visual Studio development web server.
I'm well experienced using Visual Studio to debug enterprise-level applications. I've been using the Install version which doesn't have source code for the Component libraries which is where virtually all of the exceptions seem to occur during installation. If I try the Source version, will I be able to step through the entire installation process to isolate exactly where the problem is?
Paul Schofield
DNN noob