Introducing Microsoft Web Platform Installer

On March 18th, Microsoft released Web Platform Installer 2.0. The Web Platform Installer is a small utility you can use to download, install, and maintain your Microsoft Web Platform applications. This includes Internet Information Services (Microsoft's web server), or IIS, MS SQL Server Express, Silverlight 3 Visual Studio tools, and much more. Like the ASP.NET MVC release, the Web Platform Installer (or Web PI) release was announced at Mix '09. Again, good timing here on Microsoft's part that allowed them to get this beta version out to lots of people that will be downloading new stuff. In this article, I give a full review of my user experience with Web PI 2.0 beta, including screenshots.