Question

I’m looking for some type of solution for getting a window dev environment up and running quickly.

Currently we have a large setup document (50+ pages) for doing an install, and I’d like to automate this process as much as possible. The doc includes things like updating environment variables, installing programs, downloading source code, etc.

I know that the majority of these tasks can be done with a batch script, but that’s kind of ugly and a lot of work. And while virtualization would be nice, it is not an option for us.

I’m wondering if anything exists for Windows that would make this less tedious. Something like Ruby’s Chef would be great. Does anything like this exist for windows?

Answer 1

Well there is Pkgmgr.exe for unattended installation of windows components if you mix it with a powershell script you should be able to get what you want but it wont be as easy as using Chef. Check here for an example of what you can do with Pkgmgr.exe http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/133/using-unattended-setup-to-install-iis-70/