Ruslan Yakushev has a new post talking about the latest release of Microsoft's PHP Manager for IIS being available in their Web Platform Installer.

PHP Manager 1.1 for IIS 7 has been released today. This is an incremental release that contains all the functionality available in PHP Manager 1.0 for IIS 7 plus additional features: [...] improved detection logic for existing PHP installations, configuring date.timezone, ability to add new PHP extensions.

You can find out more about the PHP Manager for IIS7 from the CodePlex project for it and can find a complete list of changes in its changelog.

On SitePoint.com today there's a new guide posted about how to get a WordPress instance up and running on an Amazon EC2 instance and the Microsoft Web Platform.

One claim I often hear from web developers, especially those who offer website design and consulting services, is their need to quickly launch websites that run fast and give them total control of the server for maximum flexibility and scalability. This is a quick tutorial on how to do just that, with a guided tour on how to run WordPress on Amazon’s EC2 Cloud and the Microsoft Web Platform. [...] WordPress and EC2 come together in a really slick way, giving you a super-fast blog or website in just a few minutes.

For those that don't already have an EC2 instance, he helps you get that set up first complete with an almost one-click install of a WordPress instance. With the help of the Web Platform Installer you can easily install not only WordPress but all of the other technology it needs to get running quickly. Screenshots accompany the tutorial descriptions to help make the whole process even simpler.

In a new post to his blog Klaus Graefensteiner talks about one of the fastest ways to get WordPress installed and running on a Windows 7 platform - the Web Platform Installer.

his is the first installment of a series of blog post called the WIMPinator Chronicles that describe how to setup a PHP development environment for Windows 7 and IIS 7.5. In this part we are taking advantage of a very cool tool called the Web Platform Installer. With a few clicks you will be able to install and configure IIS7, PHP, MySQL and a Wordpress blog on your local Windows 7 computer.

With the Web Platform Installer, the installation of the needed software is just a few clicks (and configuration settings) away. Windows users will feel right at home. His screenshots guide you through the whole process and you'll end up with IIS, PHP and MySQL installed to run the WordPress blogging platform on your local machine.

On the Server-Side Essentials blog for SitePoint.com today Akash Mehta has a new tutorial walking you through the beginning steps of using SQL Server Express and PHP with the help of the Windows Platform Installer.

This article assumes you have a basic understanding of PHP and relational databases - if you can write PHP and SQL code to manipulate database records, you’re good to go. We’ll move through the PHP fairly quickly, in order to focus on the power and simplicity of the platform.

You'll need to download the Web Platform Installer to follow along with the tutorial (or, obviously, have all of the needed software installed already). He walks you through the installation complete with screenshots including how to create the handler to let your PHP connect to the SQL Server backend and making some sample tables for PHP to select data from.

Brian Swan has posted a new guide to his blog today to help you get started with PHP on Windows the easy way - with the help of the Windows Platform Installer (and it's compared to a manual install too).

I started working on some of the posts that I've promised, but I quickly realized I should cover the basics first. So, in this post I’ll cover the requirements, options, and instructions for installing PHP and configuring Internet Information Services (IIS). [...] I suggest reading through the entire post before starting to install PHP. I will cover how to use the Web Platform Installer (WPI) and how to install PHP manually.

The guide for the Web Platform Installer is really just a series of screenshots showing the menus and the options you'll need to check to get a complete install up and running including the WinCache tool and SQL Server connectivity. The details on the manual installation aren't as detailed since there's so many options that could be set up with IIS and PHP. They rely mostly on the instructions PHP.net provides to get it working on Windows with either Apache or IIS.