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Time for a bit of a reality check.
There is no such thing as a risk-free OS upgrade. If you upgrade your OS,
you should back up all important data before doing so.
We've had several students upgrade Win XP Home to Win XP Pro without
incident, and I would think that would be the lowest risk choice. However,
YMMV.
Installing the new OS in a separate partition would involve less risk that
an upgrade, but you'd have to install Visual Studio .NET under the new OS to
get it mapped to IIS.


--
Peter - [MVP - .NET Academic]

Rajesh,
I would recommend upgrading to XP Pro if that is an option.

If you have the ability to create a second partition that is an option,
however I would recommend using Virtual PC
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/virtualpc/ or VMWare
http://www.vmware.com and create a virtual machine instead. This allows you
to continue using your first partition while the using "second partition" at
the same time. Normal dual boot is clumsy as invariable you want to use both
partitions at the same time, hence the attractiveness of a virtual machine.
Again you need to ram & CPU to support this and two OS licenses, plus
Virtual PC or VMWare. This option is especially nice when you are beta
testing software.

You could always use Web Matrix which is a free IDE that allows you to
create ASP.NET applications on XP Home.
http://www.asp.net/webmatrix/default.aspx (Note you need to use the Web
Matrix IDE, not VS.NET).

Hope this helps
Jay

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I would use either Windows XP Pro or Windows Server 2k3. XP is easier to
configure, but if you are up to a bit of frustration, experience on Windows
2k3 will be very worthwhile.

With your requirements, however, Windows XP Pro has the easiest upgrade
path. I have done it a few times on different machines (from XP home)
without any problems. I do not think Windows 2k3 will be an issue, but I
have not tested it.

One bit of advice: Even though I have not had a problem and had to resort to
pulling files from backup, always backup when you upgrade. You may be the in
the less than 1% that ends up getting burned.

With XP, there is a settings wizard for settings. Very nice inclusion.

--
Gregory A. Beamer
MVP; MCP: +I, SE, SD, DBA

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Think Outside the Box!
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Only the Cassini project, from www.asp.net can set up a web server for
ASP.NET development. It is not as easy to use with VS.NET as IIS, so XP Pro
is a better option.

--
Gregory A. Beamer
MVP; MCP: +I, SE, SD, DBA

**********************************************************************
Think Outside the Box!
**********************************************************************
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