Now that I’m getting further into learning Xojo, I’m wondering about changing my development environments around a bit.
I know the IDE System Requirements do not explicitly recommend Windows Server 2016, but I was wondering if anybody has tried and whether it failed or worked fine?
Note: Having the Xojo IDE on Windows Server 2016 would be exclusively for Windows Desktop, Console or Service app development and not Xojo Web apps nor Mac/iOS apps (I have a Mac for those).
There are a few issues in the feedback system (not game breakers) that haven’t been addressed when running the IDE on Windows Server 2012. I assume that they will also carry over to 2016. If you do come up against a problem, it will be highly unlikely that Xojo will address the issues quickly due to the limited market for the platform. If you run Parallels, I would suggest picking up a copy of Windows 10 (or less if you prefer). All that being said, you could just try it and see if/where any problems appear. Generally speaking, it should work.
I did search the forum before posting my question, but I didn’t think of checking the Feedback postings.
For what it’s worth, I was able to run the Installer for 2017R2.1 successfully on Windows Server 2016 Standard.
Note: I ran the installer with “Run as Administrator” and I have the Desktop Experience feature installed on the Server, which does enable a lot of otherwise disabled UI elements and functionality. Basically it makes the Server look and feel like Windows 10. Not sure if that makes a difference, or not?
I was also able to build a simple desktop app and load up and run an existing Xojo project from my Mac, without issues (so far).
My reasons for trying this are more about convenience, because I’d rather avoid running more than one VM at a time on my MacBook Pro (I build a lot of Server apps in .NET). I also have an all-you-can-eat MSDN Subscription, so I’m not short on Windows licences
I’ll try to remember to report back, if I continue with this setup and find any issues, for anybody that is interested.
“Desktop Experience Feature” - MS sure didn’t make that an easy add-on. In fact, our MSDN liaison strongly recommends against it. And I quote - the Windows server editions are really not designed for use as a desktop platform.
It was a few years ago, but Microsoft implemented their Server OS kernel as the same kernel for their Desktop flavours. Server just has most of the consumer level “fluff” turned off or not installed.
Certainly from a marketing perspective, it makes no sense for Microsoft to advertise Server as a Desktop replacement. The difference in price is a no-brainer. Maybe your liaison was thinking from a licensing point of view?
Granted, there are driver limitations if you need to support certain wifi, audio or graphic hardware, touch-screens, etc. And MS typically only gives you only one simple “theme” by default in Server, to accommodate what they expect will be low-end graphic hardware (which is where the Desktop Experience feature comes in handy if your hardware is not low-end).
But I don’t mind sacrificing audio or a 4k graphic experience so that I can have a solid Visual Studio and SQL Server Management Studio platform for .NET web development (my day job, Xojo is for my personal fun). You can also run MS Office on Server and set the processor resource priority to Desktop programs vs. Background services.
On all my Windows machines, whenever I install/reinstall the OS, I almost always try the latest Server OS first to see if there are enough drivers to make it work. If it does, I go with that. Been doing it for years without issue.
I guess we’ll just have to disagree in this, but in my eyes, the fact that we need sites like that to get Windows Server to act like a Desktop actually adds merit to that statement. Can you USE it as a Desktop? Yes. Should you? No. And that’s why they define them as they do.
Since you’re MSDN Premier or Enterprise like us (we have been since 1992), you know that we have enough Windows licenses to not need to play those kind of games; it’s just not worth the time or effort. I can understand if the ONLY license that you have is for a Server platform and needing to see both the desktop and server sides of Windows. But, for the same reason that we also build machines with the Home editions, we need to test against a user’s platform, not something that we cobbled together.
I don’t disagree with you Tim, I’m just saying it’s possible.
My apologies, if I was not clear on the “possible” point earlier.
Being that I was a one-man self-employed web developer for 20 years, that to develop and test my apps from server/database & proxy to client (end-to-end, while mimicking load-balancing), for all the projects I’m responsible for, I’ve had to build a network of 3 PC’s, 3 Macs and 10 VM’s (Parallels & VMware).
I just found that having my primary Windows development/debugging/profiling environment was more conveniently served by using a Server OS than a Desktop one. And it’s never let me down.
