Upgrade production server from ASP.NET 2 to ASP.NET 4

Question

I have a production server (Windows Server 2003 SP2), running several ASP.NET 2 apps under IIS6. New applications are developed using ASP.NET MVC 3 (Razor) and Entity Framework 4. Old applications are not to be touched.

Clearly, the following components need to be upgraded:

• .NET framework (install 4.0 side by side with existing 1.0, 2.0, 3.5SP1)
• ASP.NET (install v.4 side by side with 2.0)

I want to keep IIS6 to avoid surprises, but it needs to be configured for MVC 3 routing

Which installer(s) is the most appropriate in this case? There are too many different ones available from MS - full, client profile, web platform installer etc :( Goal number one is the not to break existing apps and keep downtime to a reasonable minimum.

Answer 1

Use the Web Platform Installer; it's specifically meant to help you get exactly what you need to run things. In your case, it will install the full .NET 4.0 Framework, and the other things you need, assuming you make the correct selections with it.

Installing any of the components you speak of will not do anything to your existing applications, provided you don't misconfigure them in such a way as to improperly attempt to use the new frameworks. All of this stuff works side-by-side by default.