I have been watching several of the threads on this forum that discuss installation errors and hope that someone is going to pay serious attention to them. This is not a case where "newbies" don't know what they are doing. I have over 25 years in IT, 12+ years of real experience developing .asp's and .aspx's, 6+ years of real-world support/administration of test and production W2K and W2003 servers, and 2+ years of experience with SQL Server 2000 and 2005. We are a commercial application service provider running 5 9's on our own server. In short, I'm no newbie.......just new to DNN.
Friday (10/19/2007) I downloaded DNN 4.5.5 (all available libraries), unzipped all of the libraries, and actually printed the Installation Manual and read it from cover to cover.
I have tried about 8 different installations over the past 3 days and have been successful only once in these different attempts. The successful attempt was on a Windows Server 2003 machine with the DNN database running on a separate SQL Server 2005 machine installing from the "Source" library and using the "Install" procedure in the "Source" library.
One unsuccessful attempt was on an XP Pro system (with IIS installed) from the same "Source" library -- because XP Pro doesn't support the necessary sharing/security settings required. The remainder of the unsuccessful attempts were made on an XP Media Center machine from the "Starter Kit" library.
In both the XP Pro and XP Media Center machines, Visual Studio 2005 and IIS were installed and functioning normally. In fact, the Media Center machine is my primary .aspx development machine.
The "Starter Kit" attempts have been the most frustrating. I have encountered several different errors depending upon how I run the Install (Custom, Typical, or Auto). I have received the error referenced above ("Object reference not set to an instance.........."). I have encountered the problem described in another thread where the SQL database installation step runs, and runs, and runs but never finishes. I have encountered a problem that had something to do with a stored procedure for the "Portals" data not being available in the database. All of these problems have occurred after installing the DNN Framework so I could create DNN development web sites.
After each unsuccessful test, I deleted the SQL database, set up a new database with a new name, and started from scratch. There are definitely issues with the "Starter Kit" running in these environments (and no discussion whatsoever in the documentation with respect to operating system compatability).
There appear to be many of us who need installation assistance and we are not all "newbies" who don't understand .aspx development, .NET, SQL Server, or other related tools. Is there someone out there that can provide serious assistance and post the specific solution(s) on this thread without referencing their own web site doucments?