I hate configuring a new dev machine. You know you’re going to have to kill a few hours downloading and installing components and getting things working nice with each other.

I always wished there was a tool where I could click one button and get IIS, SQL, Visual Studio and the .Net Frameworks installed and running.

Of course, now I don’t have to build dev machines and write code every day for a living… along comes a tool that does just that!

The Web Platform Installer is pretty much the answer to my prayers! It allows you to take a default build or customize exactly what gets installed (including out-of-band features like bit rate throttling, URL Rewrite and Web Playlists and some unexpected extras like the SQL Server Drivers for PHP – yes, PHP runs really well on IIS7).

It’s currently in beta so now would be a really great time to check it out and use the forums to provide lots of feedback to make it great.

Thanks to Scott for the pointer to this.