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Who would have thought… but the new Microsoft Web Platform Installer is designed to help get you get up and running with the most widely used Web Applications freely available for Windows Server. The new installer (which is beta currently) will install popular open source and .NET solutions. Included in the beta release will include DotNetNuke, Drupal, Gallery, Graffiti, osCommerce, PHPBB, and Wordpress. My first thought was… “seriously?” IIS is an awesome platform, and it’s nice to see Microsoft embracing that it can serve up more than just Microsoft languages (yes in fact it could for a long time, but it wasn’t easy or direct to do so).

What will be interesting, in regards to Wordpress, is how IIS will handle permalinks and having to use index.php in the url (sometimes, not always). Only time will tell, still exciting that Microsoft is moving in this direction.

Scott Hanselman, the studmuffin of the Microsoft world drops some knowledge and clears up some confusion about the size of the .NET Framework.

The .NET Framework is not really a 200+ meg download. From Scott’s site:

Which installer do I use?

Here’s the whole thing in a nutshell for Developers, ISVs, and Administrators.

• Offline Installer - One single file that can be run offline and can install the .NET Framework any system it’s run on. It’s complete, all platforms, installable offline.
• Online Installer - A 2.7 meg setup program that will detect what just the files you need, then go download between 10 and 60 megs.
  • NOTE: If you’re IT and inside an office, you’ll want to decide if you want everyone in the office downloading .NET separately, or if you just want download it once, and have them to run it off a network share. Check out the Deployment Guide for Administrators for ways to push it out via AD or SMS.

So how big is it the .NET Framework download, really?

It depends on what you’ve already got installed. Here’s some examples of my results using an XP SP2 machine.

Scott goes into much greater detail on his blog here. He’s also launched a section of his site called SmallestDotNet, it checks you browser’s “UserAgent” and figures out what version (if any) of the .NET Framework you have (or don’t have) installed, then calculated the total size if you chose to download the .NET Framework. Easy huh. The bummer is that it doesn’t work with FireFox.

The AJAX Control Toolkit is a joint project between the community and Microsoft. Built upon the ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions, the Toolkit aims to be the biggest and best collection of web-client components available. I’ve been using several of these on an internal .NET project and I’m pretty impressed. A few of the control produce nice effects, but take a bit more to implement than I care for, but it’s still worth checking out.

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Microsoft Office Labs releases the first community prototype from Office Labs: Speed Launch. Community prototypes are projects Microsoft employees work on in their spare time. The goal of Speed Launch is to provide lightning quick access to all the documents, files, and websites you use often. It runs on either XP or Vista, but note that it requires .NET Framework 3.0.

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