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.