Flex + WebOrb .NET on a Mac OSX

One of the best things ( work wise that is! ) that I ever did was make the switch from Windows to OSX. All those annoying Windows niggles that I’d put up with for years were suddenly gone, leaving me to get on with what I set out to do.

That said, I’d always relied on .NET as my backend solution, and immediately felt deprived that this was no longer a tool in my arsenal. By installing a copy of Windows using Parallels I’ve now got the best of both worlds. Although installing WebOrb in IIS7 was pretty painless, getting access to the services from my Mac has proved to be a proper pain in the ***! Little ( successful ) documentation seems to exists after googling for ages, so I thought I’d document my successful process here…

Firstly, the Windows network adaptor needs to be configured with a static IP

1. Control Panel — Network and Internet — Network and Sharing Center — Local Area Connection — Properties.

2. Click on Internet Protocol Version 4 ( TCP/IPv4 ) and select properties.

3. Click the ‘Use the following IP address’ radio button.

4. Add a local IP to use — I used 192.168.4.102. Click OK.

Secondly, we then need to goto the Parallels virtual machine configuration and set the ‘Network Adapter’ to ‘Shared Networking’.

Click OK. Next we need to goto Parallels Desktop preferences — Network, and make sure Connection Type is ‘Shared Networking’, with the IP we selected in step 4 greater than the ‘Start Address’ and lower than the ‘End Address’. Click OK. Now in Windows you should be able to type ‘ipconfig’ in a command prompt which will display the static IP you set earlier, and also hit IIS from a mac browser by putting the static IP in the address bar.

Now we’ve got access to IIS from our mac, we need to setup our Flex project to use WebOrb on Windows from the static IP address you set up erlier.

First copy the folder /WEB-INF from C:/inetpub/wwwroot/weborb30 to the root of our Flex project on our Mac. Open the folder and the two files inside called services-config.xml and weborb-services-config.xml and prefix all path references to weborb.aspx with the static IP we set earlier.

Change all endpoint nodes from ‘localhost’:

To the static IP you assigned earlier:

Good almost done!

Finally, we need to set the path to the services-config.xml file in our Flex project compiler settings.

Right click on your flex project, select properties then the Flex Compiler tab on the left. Enter the following into Additional compiler arguments…

where /WEB-INF/flex/services-config.xml is the path to that file from your application src folder.

I hope this helps someone as it took me hours to get working correctly!