Set Up a Development Environment

In order to develop for Microsoft Provisioning System (MPS), we recommend that you create a dedicated development environment which is made up of at least a minimal setup for MPS and the hosted service you are developing for, or a lab deployment of the solution reference architecture. In this way, you ensure that the production system is not impacted by any activity during the development phase.

What You Will Need

Following is a list of the items you will need if you do not want to deploy the solution completely:

Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 Machine
MPS Distribution from the Microsoft Solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration media
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 installation media
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 installation media
A domain controller that you have administrative access to (can be a Virtual Server)
A server running the service you are creating a provider for, and which you can use to try out your provider (can be a Virtual Server)

Get Started

Following are the steps to follow in order to prepare your environment for development for MPS.

Procedure MPSSDK.1: To prepare the MPS development environment

On all machines, install the operating system and the latest service pack and hotfixes.
Join all machines to the domain.
Install SQL Server 2005 on your development server.
Install Visual Studio 2005 on your development server.
Install MPS on your development server, using the MPF.MSI and following the Install Wizard. Install all components except the ISAPI Filter.
Reboot the development server.
Install the MPF SDK.
If you need the other providers and namespaces shipped with the solution, you can install the respective MSIs on the MPS Engine Server from the solution distribution CD.

Note

When running the MSIs, you will receive a warning that they can only be installed by using the MPS Deployment Tool. To get around this, use this command line without the quotes "msiexec /i msiname.msi ENABLEUI=YES" (the parameter is case sensitive).

Important

Do not use this for a production system; these instructions are for development systems only.

Now that this is done you will have to set up the environment variables on the development server.

Procedure MPSSDK.2: To set up the environment variables on the development server

Open the computer properties, and then, on the Advanced tab, add the following path to the Path Variable C:\Program Files\Microsoft Provisioning\Tools
Add the Domain\MPFServiceAccts Group to the local Administrators Group.
Add the Domain\MPFClientAccts to the Local DCOM Users Group.
Restart the MPF Engine COM+ Application using the Component management MMC Snap-in (dcomcnfg.exe).
Open a command prompt and type provtest.exe /X3 "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Provisioning\Samples\Simple.xml"
You should get a response that is formated XML in green and blue looking like this:
```
<response>
?   <data>
?	<organizations>
?		 <organization name="tailspintoys.com"/>
?	</organizations>?   
		</data>?
</response>
```
If the response is a error in yellow and red like the following example, the error message might be different.
```
<response>?  
<errorContext description="No provisioning engines are available to process the request." code="0xc2201908"/>
</response>
```

Make sure that all the environment settings are done correctly. If in doubt please post questions on the Microsoft Provisioning Forum.

Once you have set up MPF, you are now ready to start the process of developing the provider. See Get Started with Provider Development.