Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

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Ho Hum: No More FrontPage Server Extensions for Unix

The other day, I received a "Maintenance Notice" from the service where all of my web sites are hosted.  I figured it would be some planned outage or, perhaps, a server migration.  No, this maintenance was a little more exciting than that:

Maintenance Type: FrontPage Server Extensions END OF LIFE

Maintenance Severity: Only affects users of FPSE

Scheduled Date:  No longer supported after March 31, 2008

My sites are on an Apache server and the server-side extensions they speak of are the ones that work on Unix/Linux.  I don't rely on those at all.  This case applies to me:

The following notification is ONLY for customers who are actively using Front
Page Server Extensions.  If you are using the FrontPage product in FTP
publishing mode, this notice does NOT affect you.

And, indeed, I do use FTP to maintain my site (and to back it up).  I don't use FrontPage for that, though.

Tick Tock, Tick Tock: Depending on FrontPage for Authoring

What made my palms sweat is that I do use FrontPage Server Extensions (FPSE) on the web-site development server here on my SOHO LAN.  This is a very big deal for me:

• I use the design-time Include Pages feature to propagate templates of common material onto pages of the sites.  This is all over my sites.  It is also how I implement version progressions of content with the latest version always at the same page.
   
• I use the integration of FrontPage Server Extensions and Visual SourceSafe integration to provide versioning, backup, and source control of the web pages on the development site
   
• Then I use a shared-image of the development site to synchronize with the hosted site via FTP
    
• I even use VSS check-outs, FTP synchronization, VSS check-ins and new-file adds to archive this very blog, merging the blog pages transferred from Blogger back into my development image and into VSS for backup, archiving, and presence in my development web site.  I have had to use the VSS backups to restore damaged blog articles on occasion.

The whole scheme is my personal, rudimentary variant of the Microsoft Site Server model without the automation and any commerce-related fancies.  I have strictly plain-vanilla web sites with nearly-nonexistent server side processing and no client-side processing.  I have relied on this approach for over ten years.  I expected to continue to depend on it.  It's not broken and I don't feel any compulsion to fix it.  It hadn't occurred to me that the FPSE might disappear.

The FrontPage Improvement Movement

In February 2006, Microsoft announced the retirement of FrontPage.  This was to be accomplished two ways:

• With the availability of Sharepoint 2007 Designer, which is only useful for web sites on Sharepoint and is of no use to me at all
    
• With the availability of Expression Web, a premium-priced product that emerged in 2007 as part of the Expression Studio suite of professional tools that also include Expression Blend, Expression Designer, Expression Media and a version of Visual Studio

Support for FrontPage is scheduled to decline starting in June 2008.  The only reasonable Microsoft-sourced replacement for me is Expression Web.  (The Web Developer Express tool, mentioned as an option, just isn't.)

The emphasis of Expression Web is on standards-based web sites: XML, XHTML, CSS, and ASP.NET.  Fortunately, Expression Web will also support less-than-current but still standards-based web sites.  It will interact with my web-site development server.  It can be tricked into working with some of the Front Page extensions, but it doesn't make pages that depend on FPSE server-time behavior (and I don't either).  It will honor Include Page behavior and interact with those local Front Page Server Extensions if I already have pages that do that.  I do, and I make more by copying existing ones that do.

So I might be convinced to upgrade to Expression Web.  I am nervous about taking Vicki's copy of FrontPage 2002 away from her.  I need to start using Expression Web myself, verify that we can find Expression Web ways to do what we already know how to do in FrontPage, and then switch off our copies of FrontPage after I gently walk Vicki through the differences that she'll have to adjust to.

We could also choose to keep limping along using FrontPage 2002/2003 and features we know work for us.  That might buy us a little more time.

Oh, What About the Web Server?

Umm, that may be more difficult.

The development web server is running on a vintage 1998 Dell Inspiron laptop that never leaves the SOHO LAN.  It uses Windows XP, IIS 5.1, FrontPage Server Extensions, and integration with Visual SourceSafe on the same machine.

I figured I would migrate the entire development web server to a Windows Home Server that I have still sitting in its shipping carton in a corner of my office.  Then I could retire the Inspiron (and a 1999-vintage Dimension XPS T600 that is waiting for unloading of any Windows 98 goodies still parked on its hard drive).

What about FPSE and VSS integration?  I have no idea how long I can use that and what it takes to have them on WHS.  It is high time that I updated to Visual SourceSafe 2005 and I would consider introducing that on WHS too. 

But I don't know how long FPSE will run with IIS. 

I am probably safe with Windows Home Server while it runs on a Windows Server 2003 base, but I might be stymied when it comes time to upgrade to whatever WHS version runs on Windows Server 2008.

There is slight consolation in the remote protocol for Front Page Server-Extensions being on the Open Protocol Specifications list announced by Microsoft on February 21 along with the Open Interoperability Principles.  Somehow, I don't think I'll be going into the FPSE business and negotiating a license (PDF form), though.  Maybe someone else will.

It is only the integration with Visual SourceSafe and the integration of that, via FPSE, that has me continue to use this arrangement for web-site development.  If I can't preserve that particular functionality with good-enough substitutes for FrontPage, we might as well find some other web server that I can integrate the source-code control with.  I'm not keen on digging into that and I'm particularly not thrilled to distort a workflow that works just fine at the moment.  I could stand to add more automation to the synchronization and backup process for the hosted sites, but I don't need a complete new toolset to accomplish that.

---

I have used FrontPage since the original beta and free distribution of FrontPage 1.0.  I can answer trivia questions about those _vti_cnf folder names.  The initial experience was using Personal Web Server, the IIS Express of its day.  I've used Visual Source Safe from at least version 4.0 and my SOHO use of VSS 6.0d relies heavily on the sharing feature.  I use sharing to define mirrors of the development folders; those provide the FTP images for synchronizing with the hosted sites.   I use VSS sharing in development projects as well, and I will use it to coordinate locally-developed changes with other source code control systems, such as Subversion on SourceForge.

I recognized the value of a simplified Site Server model around 1995 when Microsoft was busily promoting browser neutrality and its web server technology as a way to achieve it.  This ecumenical enthusiasm ended somewhere between the release of Internet Explorers 4.0 and 5.0.  I implemented my development setup when I started producing my own web sites in February, 1999.  My concession to web standards is to use HTML 4.01 Transitional, apart from a few FrontPage idiosyncrasies that do no harm.

It's not an easy life, being a dinosaur. 

posted by orcmid at 3/02/2008 05:57:00 PM