If you try to access Documents and Settings folder in Windows 7, you will get the following message box thrown at you.

[Window Title]
Location is not available

[Content]
C:\Documents and Settings is not accessible.

Access is denied.

[OK]

First, Documents and Settings folder is not visible when you look in system drive. In my previous post How to set folder view options, i discussed how you can change the options to make system files and folders visible. Now you have the folder visible but its not accessible even when you are logged in as administrator. Now Documents and Settings is actually a link to another folder Users in your system drive. Yes, this is the folder where all the users related data is stored. Under this folder you will find folders for all users who have ever logged into the system and some of default system users as well. You can access individual users folders. This is where you will find folders like My Documents, My pictures, Favorites etc. You will notice a lot of these folders have a blue curved up-arrow icon with it. Yes, this indicates that these folders are shortcut or links to actual physical location of the folders. And you will not be able to access these folder from these links. If you have change the folder options to view hidden files and folders, you will be able to see actual folders like My Documents, Local Settings etc. You can access these folders to get to physical location of data. One other important folder that you need to know about it Local Settings. This is also a link to actual location in user folder. There is no hidden Local Settings folder. You will find another hidden folder AppData. Click on this folder and you will find following sub-folders.

• Local
• LocalLow
• Roaming

This is where you will find the folders that you are used to seeing under Local Settings and Application Data folders. In general you if you are looking for folders that used to be in Documents and Settings folder, look in the following folder (assuming you have installed operating system in C drive).

This little piece of information about folder structure in Windows 7 should help you get started in exploring more folders that you may otherwise think have been removed since Windows XP.

If you are moving from Windows Vista to Windows 7, then there is no much change in how to add remove programs and applications. But for users migrating from Windows XP, there is some change in how Add/Remove Programs works in Windows 7. Following is step by procedure that will show to add or remove programs in Windows 7.

Add/Remove Programs in Windows 7

1. Click on the Start button and you will notice Control Panel item in right pane. See the picture below.
   
2. Click on Control Panel option and it will bring up new dialog box Adjust your computer's settings. There is a option named Programs. Click on it.
   
3. Clicking on Programs option will bring up new window that has section Programs and Features as shown below. You will notice that this section has few moe options to perform various tasks related to adding or removing programs.
   
   • Uninstall a program

     Clicking on this option will bring up list of all programs that are currently installed on your machine. Click on the one that you want to uninstall or update, click on that program. And then click on Uninstall/Change link in the bar to perform the action.

   • Turn Windows features on or off

     Clicking on this option will bring up list of all windows features that are currently turned on or are available to be turned on. You can go through the list of features and decide which ones you need to alter. Usually you will not need to access this option unless you are developing some applications or need to turn on or off or some windows behavior.

   • View installed updates

     Clicking on this option will bring up list of all the updates to various windows components have been installed on your machine. You will notice that they have been nicely arranged by component categories. If you know that any of these updates is causing unwanted effects, you can click on that update and then click on Uninstall to remove that update.

     

After installing Windows 7 Ultimate on my development workstation, it was time to install my development tools like SQL Server, Visual Studio, Fiddler and all that good stuff. If you are doing web development, you have to make sure that you have IIS and ASP.Net installed and activated on your machine. If you are moving to Windows 7 from Windows XP, you will notice that somethings and wizards to install IIS have changed in Windows 7. Following step by step procedure will explain how to install IIS.

Like Windows XP, IIS installation is still part of Windows feature turning on or off. In my previous post How to add remove programs in Windows 7 I described how you can add or remove programs. In the section Turn Windows features on or off, I mentioned that this was the place where you will toggle windows features. IIS is part of windows features. So this is the place where you will be turning on some switches.

• Bring up Turn Windows features on or off dialog box. And you will notice an item in the list named Internet Information Services. This is what you will need to turn on.
  
• Expand this item in the tree and you will see three nodes for this item in the tree, FTP Serer, Web Management Tools and World Wide Web Services. You can expand these three nodes to see what all features are available and what you need to turn on.

FTP Server

If you are doing any development related to FTP service or want to turn your machine into a FTP server, then you will need to check FTP Service option on. You can turn on FTP Extensibility if you want to do some custom FTP publishing using custom extension. Otherwise you can leave it off.

Web Management Tools

By default Windows 7 does not install IIS management console or any other tools to manage web applications. This is the node where you will turn on components and features to manage web applications.

World Wide Web Services

This is important part of IIS installation. By default ASP.Net and ASP is not enabled in IIS. It will only serve static content. You will need to turn them on under Application Development Features. When you expand this node, you will notice options for ASP,ASP.Net,CGI etc. Depending on your development and deployment needs you can turn them on or off accordingly. If you do not turn on these features, you will get server run time errors or the dynamic content will not be served.

Other important feature under World Wide Web Services is Performance Features.

To optimize and reduce download time of your pages on client browsers, it is important that you compress as much content as possible. You can turn that feature on or off from this Performance Features option. You will notice that Static Content Compression is turned on by default.

Last node under World Wide Web Services is Security and the most important part of your web application to ensure security of your content and data.

From this node you can control what security features are turned on off for your applications. You will need to use this section depending on needs of your individual applications.

Need to restart?

In the previous build of Windows 7, i did not have to restart my machine to turn on IIS after making the changes. But when i tried this with latest RTM release on my laptop, the configuration change did not take into affect immediately. And the wizard did not prompt me to restart my machine either. but after I restarted my machine, IIS was enabled and I was able to serve ASP.Net applications from the machine. So, if you run into similar situation, try restarting your machine.

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