Microsoft's Web Platform Installers

Friday, October 17, 2008

Here's something really exciting for web developers. Microsoft has come up with a web platform installer for free. It allows you to install IIS 7.0, Visual Web Developer 2008 Express, SQL Server 2008 Express and the .NET Framework. No more painful configuration settings required. The installer automatically configures all these components for a smooth experience and allows you to start working instantly.

Apart from the platform installer, a web application installer(AI) is also there for you to install the most commonly used open-source web applications. This installer can download and configure frequently used .NET web applications for ecommerce, content management, blogs, forums etc. It automatically downloads the latest version of the applications and provides a seamless integration and configuration on IIS.

The installers are in their Beta and the future releases will have much more features including support for PHP on IIS 7 and many more applications will be added to the AI. These are similar to XAMP and other installers which install and configure Apache, PHP and MySQL for PHP based web development. So, now we have auto-configure installers for ASP.Net web development. For detailed information about these installers, read about them at Channel 8.

These packages are part of the Microsoft /web, which is a site dedicated for providing web resources for the web developers. The site links to many useful articles, event listings, and relevant and valuable conversation from around the Web.