There has been a little noise about the Web Platform Installer (WebPI) on a few blogs in the past week or so – not least from Hanselman and Phil Haack. I’m pleased to see the challenge of kitting out a machine with all of “the good stuff” is being tackled in this way. The WebPI essentially installs up-to-date versions of IIS7, SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer.

We’ve also announced that we’re releasing Web Application Installer (WebAI) which will download, install and configure (including checking of pre-reqs) some of the most popular .NET- and PHP-based web packages. Good examples include DotNetNuke, Drupal, Gallery, Graffiti, osCommerce, PHPBB, and WordPress.

You can get the downloads from the /web portal.