A couple of days ago, Microsoft released a handy new tool to help users and developers install web applications on Windows. The tool is known as the 'Microsoft Web Application Installer' and comes in beta.
Basically the purpose of such a tool is to help users and developers install the most widely used Web Applications on their Windows Server. Web AI provides support for popular ASP.Net and PHP Web applications including Graffiti, DotNetNuke, WordPress, Drupal, OSCommerce and more.
The Microsoft Web AI checks your system for the necessary pre-requisites, downloads these open-source applications from their repositories, configures the basic settings and then guides you through the installation procedure.
The requirements go as follows.
- Supported Operating Systems are: Windows Vista RTM, Windows Vista SP1, Windows Server 2008
- You must have administrator privileges on your computer to run Web Platform Installer Beta
- .NET 2.0 Framework
- Supported Architectures: x86 and 64-bit
To make these applications work, 'Microsoft Web Platform' is required which sets up the basic environment for these web applications. Both the installers for Microsoft Web AI and Microsoft Web PI can be download from the link provided at the end of the post.
With other tools such as XAMPP, which lets you setup a whole LAMP environment on Windows, Linux or Mac, its hard to imagine users would be switching to Microsoft Web AI anytime soon. The purpose of Microsoft here is convince developers to host their applications on Windows Server platform but with the security that Linux has to offer, I doubt Microsoft would be offering any true competition.
http://www.microsoft.com/web/channel/products/downloads.aspx