According to an e-mail from Microsoft's Scott Guthrie, because of technical issues the company will not be using NT4 to support ASP.NET. The following is a transcript of an e-mail sent by Guthrie to the ASPNG e-mail discussion list concerning ASP.NET and NT4:
"Unfortunately we will not be able to support ASP.NET deployment on NT4 for V1. While we originally planned to enable this (and in fact provided limited support for it in Beta1), we ran into a number of blocking technical issues in the Beta2 timeframe that prevented us from accomplishing this.
"Specifically, we discovered (rather late in the game) that we would need to do significant development work on our core thread pool and security architecture in order to reliably run on NT4 -- and that we'd require
additional work from the COM+ team to enable support for features like transactions, object pooling, etc.
"We also found that trying to support our stress testing efforts across 3 different server OS versions (NT4, Win2k and Whistler) was just too much for the team to handle. We require more than 300 server stress runs to signoff on a given build -- supporting 3 OS variations translates into 900 different server setups/runs/result analysis/etc (which is just too big a task to try and tackle multiple times each week).
"In the end we costed the development work to support NT4 for production at more than 7 weeks -- which would have translated into a major slip in the schedule. This -- combined with the quality guarantee concerns we
had over supporting NT4 in stress -- ultimately led us to make the painful decision not to support NT4 deployments.
"As such -- you cannot deploy ASP.NET applications on NT4 and run them through IIS. Instead you'll need to update to either Windows 2000 or Windows XP (professional or server editions for either).
"However, you *will* be able to run the rest of the .NET Framework (Windows Forms, Client Apps, etc) on NT4. The decision I described above only related to the server piece of the Framework. As such, you can download and install the .NET Framework on these non-win2k/xp platforms.
"We *will* also support developing ASP.NET applications on NT4 using Visual Studio.NET (the ASP.NET designer will load just fine -- you can drag/drop and build ASP.NET apps just fine with it, etc). However, to run and test those applications out you will need to remote deploy them onto a Windows 2000 or Windows XP machine (note that VS.NET automates this remote deployment -- so its pretty easy todo).
"Apologies for those of you hoping for ASP.NET support on NT4. We really wanted to provide it for you -- and actually invested a lot of effort trying to make it happen.
"Ultimately, however, we just felt that we would be doing customers a bigger service by not taking such a big a schedule delay -- and instead focus on ensuring that we have the highest possible quality product."
