I had a need over the weekend to do a little PHP work. Now, I’m no expert in web anything, most of my time has been spent building nice happy fat client apps <g>. But, when I’ve needed to do a little web tinkering, my host (www.ServerGrid.com) pretty much supports everything, so I’ve just uploaded my files and had at it.

However, this time, I wanted to get things running locally, to avoid all the upload/download hassles.

A few google searches turned up the Microsoft Web Platform Installer.

Wow! Something other than Office, VS and SQLServer that Microsoft has done right!

It took a few minutes to run through, and I had to tweak the PHP.INI file a bit (using the instructions here), but, all told, I had a PHP 5.2 installation fully operational under a local IIS7 server in, oh, 10 minutes.

It the Web Platform Installer can install a lot of other stuff too. CMS, SugarCRM, DasBlog, and a bunch more.

Definitely worth the download!