Indigo installation blues

Indigo is the codename for Microsoft’s unified programming model for building connected systems. It extends the .NET Framework 2.0 with additional APIs for building secure, reliable, and transacted Web services. Microsoft released Community Technology Preview (CTP) in March 2005 to enable developers to experiment with early builds of technologies and provide them feedback. CTP is a new acronym to me but a similar concept what we call Early Access (EA). For instance, JAX-RPC 2.0 EA build was released recently and we expect developers to download the build, get familiar with the programming model and provide us feedback. Indigo is expected to provide support for the various WS-* specs floating around. Indigo will ship as part of the Windows release code-named Longhorn, scheduled for 2006. As with CTP, it will also be made available on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. Now enough of Indigo details, lets get to my brief experience with Indigo so far.

I decided to install Indigo and get familiar with it and I need to admit that the experience is definitely not a pleasant one so far. I started on a clean slate Windows XP/SP2 machine and here is my progress bar:

1. I had to google for configuration mismatches between Visual Studio 2005 Beta2 and Indigo. It seems Visual Studio 2005 beta2 and Indigo have different .NET runtimes that are not compatible. However the CTP ISO image lists Visual Studio 2005 beta2 as the first bullet in installation process that can very easily confuse and potentially waste lot of time since it takes a while to install these monsters. And so before I know about the non compatibility, Visual Studio window will flash and then disappear, duh! Anyway, I figured out not-so-easy way of how to take care of that. And I realized I'll not be able to use the IDE that Microsoft is well known for. Is that only me or is that true for others as well ? 
2. By default, Windows XP installation in our labs do not have IIS installed (yeah, it's risky) and I was not aware that IIS needs to be installed as a separate component. So on my clean slate machine I installed .NET framework, Avalon (just for fun) and then Indigo and started playing around with Indigo samples. But then the documentation requires you to check for service extension registration. However it does not say what to do if the extension is not found registered :(. And when I tried adding an extension registration, Add button was disabled. Anyway, I took a calculated guess of uninstalling all Indigo-related stuff, installed IIS and then reinstalled all Indigo related stuff. Phew, finally I could verify that the service extension is now registered.
3. Moving along, the samples documentation mentions a Download button so that I can download the entire sample at one go, but I could not find such a button on any of the samples, specifically Getting Started sample that I started to play with. So I had to download each file individually. And even then there are so many support files (probably required by Visual Studio) so I had to hand pick only the relevant files since I'm IDE-disabled as mentioned earlier. 
4. Even when downloading the source files, I got 404 when trying to browse service.svc in the sample. I'm not sure when trying to view service.svc in the sample page, is the extension registered in my local IIS playing any role (I dont think it should but dont know for sure). So I tried stopping IIS service but still got the same 404 error. I finally created my own service.svc and copied all the relevant files in a directory.

After creating the virtual directory for the sample, giving the appropriate permissions etc. I've still not been able to deploy a simple Indigo sample and view the WSDL or /mex endpoint. My default browser is Firefox but I decided to use IE for viewing these pages because you never know :). Here is the error that I'm getting:

The tracking (workstation) service is not running
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of
the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more
information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.Net.HttpListenerException: The tracking
(workstation) service is not running

Source Error:

An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the
current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of
the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below.

Stack Trace:


[HttpListenerException (0x494): The tracking (workstation) service is
not running]
   System.Net.HttpListener.AddAll() +298
   System.Net.HttpListener.Start() +207
   System.ServiceModel.Channels.SharedHttpTransportManager.OnOpen() +653

[ChannelListenException: The tracking (workstation) service is not running]
   System.ServiceModel.Channels.SharedHttpTransportManager.OnOpen() +1095

System.ServiceModel.Channels.TransportManager.Open(TransportListenerFactory
listenerFactory) +129

System.ServiceModel.Channels.TransportListenerFactory.SelectTransportManagers()
+617
   System.ServiceModel.Channels.TransportListenerFactory.OnOpenCore() +59
   System.ServiceModel.Channels.HttpListenerFactory.OnOpen() +17
   System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open() +264
   System.ServiceModel.ServiceHost.OnOpen() +128
   System.ServiceModel.Channels.CommunicationObject.Open() +264
   System.ServiceModel.HostingManager.EnsureServiceAvailable(String
processedVirtualPath) +756
   System.ServiceModel.Channels.HttpRequestAsyncResult.HandleRequest() +360

System.ServiceModel.Channels.HttpRequestAsyncResult..ctor(HttpApplication
context, AsyncCallback callback, Object state) +665
   System.ServiceModel.Channels.HttpModule.StartBeginProcessRequest(Object
sender, EventArgs e, AsyncCallback cb, Object extraData) +64

System.Web.AsyncEventExecutionStep.System.Web.HttpApplication.IExecutionStep.Execute()
+90
   System.Web.HttpApplication.ExecuteStep(IExecutionStep step,
Boolean& completedSynchronously) +157 

My IIS services are running (because I'm not getting a 404), workstation (as indicated in the error message is definitely running) and googling on tracking service shows that that service should be running as well (and I verified it). I tried searching MSDN April 2005 DVD for this error message and no hits. I need to debug this further and will probably do that Monday.

I saw Simon Fell's blog entry of being able to view the WSDL atleast, so may be it's just me. And of course, I'll post my final "working" set of instructions once I figure them out.