Some Vista Dev Gotchas

So far, Vista has been good to me. Sure, every time I move the mouse it prompts me with a security warning, but, whatever. I'm learning to live with it.

While configuring my dev environment this morning, I ran into these gems:

• MySQL 5.0.51a doesn't run - it gives some odd error about "This application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect." The only solution seems to be to downgrade to 5.0.47 or upgrade to 5.1.22.
• The default configuration in Apache 2.2 denies all requests. For some reason, the configuration says:

  <Directory />
      Options FollowSymLinks
      AllowOverride None
      Order deny,allow
      Deny from all
  </Directory>
  

• For reasons that I can't explain, I was able to edit the stock httpd.conf file in emacs, and save my changes. Yet, when I opened the file up in notepad my changes hadn't taken effect. Yet, when I opened them up in emacs, they were there again. Somehow, I was able to edit this file and have my own version stored for me or some such nonsense. This means that I was configuring the server, and yet none of my changes were taking effect. Odd.

Now I've got to convince PHP that it has MySQL support - this only took me about 3 hours to do on XP. Wonder how long it will take on Vista...

Update: Setup of PHP wasn't too painful at all. The only issue I ran into was that I had downloaded the Windows Installer version instead of the Zip Package. As far as I can tell, the Install version leaves off all the extra modules. Why, I have no idea. Once I got the Zip package "installed" and the extension_dir set properly (to: c:/tools/php-5.2.5-Win32/), everything Just Worked. Next time, I'm going WAMP.