If you want to develop against WordPress (i.e., have a local instance running on your machine so you can develop themes, get blogs and sites laid out, etc.) and you’re running Windows on your development machine with IIS and SQL Server already installed, what’s the best way to do it?
I found a method online which sets up a little ‘mini’ server on Windows running instances of Apache and MySQL but they didn’t advise using it on a machine with IIS already installed. Obviously one could install Apache and MySQL and do it that way but given what Windows affords you (i.e., methods of running PHP in IIS – I think Windows Server 2008 is even optimized for this), is that the best way? Are there ways to run WordPress with SQL Server as the backend? (I wouldn’t think so but I thought I’d throw that out there).
And are there methods differing on the version of Windows (i.e., XP, Vista, Vista64)
I run XAMPP on a thumbdrive and install WordPress (usually multiple instances of it) on there. Then I start up XAMPP when I’m going to work on WordPress development.
EDIT: this setup does require that IIS be stopped when the XAMPP server is running (or some byzantine configuration magic that I’ve never bothered to figure out. Since most of my personal needs for local IIS development are handled by the Visual Studio built-in instance of IIS, which can run side-by-side with XAMPP, I rarely have bother with anything else, but that probably won’t work for everyone.