As with a lot of people here, I am running into issues installing DNN 4.5.  I have downloaded the docs and tried to follow them as best as I can but still running into issues.

I have VMD installed on my XP machine and am trying to install DNN 4.5 (StarterKit).  Everything installs fine, but when I try to open a new project; VWD crashes on me.  I delete all of the files and VWD opens with no issues.  I'm not trying to go through the Install download and am running into an issue with the sections that are supposed to be inside my web.config file.  Is the web.config file the one that came with .Net 2.0?  If so, I don't have the "appSettings" section in my web.config.

Also, it makes reference to the changes between 3.x and 4.x.  That's great, but I don't have 3.x installed.  Should I install 3.x, get it up and running then upgrade to 4.5?

Any help would be appreciated.  DNN looks like a cool app, but if I can't get it configured, it does me no good.

Thanks for the quick reply Paul.  Here's the thing  I read the installation guide of DNN throughly, but will re-read them.  They are pretty simple for a fresh install of DNN, which starts on page 27; without much for pre-installation steps.

In my environment I have an SQL 2005 Server, so I chose not to install SQL 2005 Express; that included with the fact it was already on my machine.

When I install DNN through VWD, it told me that one of the modules failed (VS 2005) because it was "Not intended for your version of VS".  I have the Visual Studio that came with the SQL 2005 tools.  I have since uninstalled that app.

When I "Install" DNN through VWD it copies the Zip files to the path on another of my servers.  I have not figured out how to stop that from happening though.  When I remove the zip files, VWD stops locking up and crashing.  I let it run for about 5 minutes one time hoping it would open it up, but nothing ever did.

I did not follow the "uninstall" directions from the VWD website, but will do that as well.  But I don't feel it is an issue with the install since VWD works without issues when DNN zip files are not located in the template paths.

I opened up the DotNetNuke.zip file, which was copied to the Fileserver path during install, and found the Web.Config file that I was "missing".  I followed the steps for the Source Code install and got further, but it generated an error message when trying to run it on the server.  When I left, I was trying to install VWD & DNN on one of the servers, still not selecting SQL Express since I already have it on my machine.