Web Platform Installer: Trying to make it easier to setup for web development
There's a renewed focus, in my opinion, to make things easier to find around The Big Blue Monster. I'm working with a bunch of folks on a more official version of http://www.smallestdotnet.com and some changes around making the .NET Framework easier to find, as a small example.
Getting a machine up to speed for Web Development is another thing that's kind of a hassle because you need to go get (and know to go get) IIS7, Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition, SQL Server 2008 Express Edition and the .NET Framework, yada yada yada.
There's a new site at http://www.microsoft.com/web and a new (beta) of the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (blog announcement). It's basically a super bootstrapper that keeps track of where to get stuff and organizes them as profiles.
If I select "Your Choice" I get a complete list from a catalog of things that can be downloaded. I can auto-select options from a dropdown like "PHP Developer" or "Classic ASP Developer." Cool that those options are there as well as ASP.NET Developer. There's a manifest that it downloads to get the latest versions of each of these.
On the Web Server tab, it'll pick the right IIS modules you'd need to get a site up, but it also shows as options some of the more interesting (and not well publicized) modules like ARR and BitRate Throttling that have been released since IIS7 came out.
If you're running a Web Development shop, it's certainly a quick way to get everything you'd need installed, including the free version of Visual Studio Web Express.
Check it out, and if you have any trouble or find anything interesting, you can report it directly to the team at the Web Platform Installer Forum. If you like it or hate it, let them now. It'd be interesting to see how extensible it can be and if they choose to extend it other developer products.
About Scott
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
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Even better, a tool that manages host-headers for those websites with a set of rules in the HOSTS file (appname.local?) although obviously that only makes it easier on your dev box, and not across the network.
Small shops/home developers are now well beyond the single-website restriction in IIS making sense. Simulating/testing cross-domain scenarios, and cross-platform testing in particularly is difficult for the 'Express' developer.
Just a thought...
p.s. I've just tried to post this twice with Blogger OpenID (XP, FF2), got the following error both times:
Server ErrorI can see other commenters have used OpenID, but it didn't work for me :-(
404 - File or directory not found.
The resource you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.
http://www.asp.net/learn/videos/video-14.aspx
I try to keep at least one foot in the Ubuntu world and something which works really well are the apt-get commands. They also end up being very how-to-blog and search-engine friendly. There's nothing more satisfying that cutting and pasting an apt-get install from a reference site to a command-line.
For example:
c:\>winstall iis7 sqlexpress aspnet vs2008
c:\>winstall -update dotnetfwk
Is there a toolkit available (now or soon) with which we could do this?
Its a shame that the inevitable politics of supporting only the current OS (even relatively unpopular ones) in much of MS's great ideas seems to blunt the good work that is done elsewere. Good effort but failed in execution.
Surely Microsoft could remove the frustrating single website restriction of IIS 5.1 in XP as an outward sign of their slow progression into giving their customers what they're actually asking for and not simply piling on more eye candy?
They (Microsoft) have made great strides in this area lately (specfically MVC - I love it) and I can't see how removing this restriction, which has been requested for years and years (literally) can do anything but strengthen their image amongst existing MS developers?
Is it perhaps a deep-rooted, non-trivial issue that prevents them from doing so?
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