Recovery mode

Urgh. Been in recovery mode all weekend.

My development machine's HDD went kaput. Fortunately I have an extended warranty with Dell. They actually did pretty good ... they overnighted me a new hard drive and sent me a waybill label so I could ship the defective drive back to them.

Unfortunately, that means I have to completely reinstall / reconfigure my development environment.

Several annoyances about doing .NET development on Windows XP:

1. IIS doesn't come installed out of the box. You have to go into Control Panel->Add or Remove Programs->Windows Components and install it, which means having to dig up your Windows XP media (unless you're installing from the hard drive).
2. IIS 5.1 doesn't support multiple virtual servers without this nifty IIS hack.

I'm trying to get back to the point where I'm doing development, instead of installing apps and configuring stuff.