This article is cross-posted from my personal blog.
Today (March 18th, 2009) during the keynote at MIX 09, Scott Guthrie announced the release of version 2 of the Web Platform Installer (WPI) and the release of the new Web Application Gallery.
Bill Staples, the Program Manager responsible for the Web Application Gallery described it as an “App Store for the Web”. I am pleased to say that DotNetNuke Community Edition is part of this initiative and that Bill Staples used DotNetNuke as his demonstration install during the keynote.
If you want to download and try DotNetNuke Community Edition you can install it from the Web Application Gallery by clicking the image below.
The Installation Experience
When you click on an the install link, you will get a popup (in Firefox 3) that confirms which program you want to use to run the installer. In my case I already have the Web Platform Installer on my machine.
The Installer will launch and you will get the following screen.
Clicking on Install will download the application (in the case of DotNetNuke from Codeplex) and display the following screen, where you can provide an “Application Name” – the default is dotnetnuke.
The second page allows the user to configure the database.
Clicking continue will set up IIS and SQL Server. You will then see the final screen, which lets you know that the install was successful.
Finally clicking the link will automatically launch the DotNetNuke Install Wizard to complete the installation of your DotNetNuke Application.
Scott Hanselman has blogged about the new installer, using Das Blog as the example. He describes some of the technical details behind the installer. In a future article I will describe the set up of the DotNetNuke package, which I created for this initiative.
I think this is an important step in improving the install/setup experience of web applications. Go to the Web Application Gallery and add your reviews (good of course!) and rating for DotNetNuke.