What order to install software on a developer rig?

Question

Hi all,

I'm new to the development world, I am gradually teaching myself programming after 15 years as an ITPro. It's been a while since I worked with devs in a day to day setting and had to support them, so here is my question.

What order do I install things on a new developer workstation, how much of this matters? this is a brand new windows 7 enterprise system, x64 with plenty of nice hardware

but do i install SQL first? IIS? VS.Net? what about the SDK's I plan on using? I assume they go on last?

How do you all approach it? or does it simply not matter enough to think about it?

Thanks all,

Ryan

Answer 1

I'd install SQL Server last, it has a slough of things it looks for (and will tell you to update) before it will install. So I'd go OS > IIS > VS.NET > SQL Server.

Answer 2

If you are supporting developers, I would think the first step is to ask them which tools they want. Then install them in any order that works. (That is, install dependencies first.)

Answer 3

Not much experience with Windows 7 but I can tell you that it took some time to get the installation procedures for Windows XP and the associated development tools documented on our team.

Our basic approach was to install Windows and all Windows components (like IIS) first. Then we installed the development tools in order of their release (i.e. Visual Studio 2003 before Visual Studio 2005/2008).

My biggest suggestion would be to document the installation and be prepared to start from scratch a few times until you get it right. You'll know if you got it wrong by the presence of error messages and such.

Another suggestion would be to eliminate tools that you don't need. Our installation would be much cleaner if we could kill off old tools (or host VMs - our organization won't allow us to do that).

In fact, you could have a clean workstation hosting VMs for the various development efforts you will undertake (one VM for SharePoint, one VM for Web, etc.). Then the developers could restore VMs easily without following installation procedures.

Answer 4

If you plan to do web development, Microsoft has a nice package of their software that you can install all at once: http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx. I was surprised to find that version 2 even includes PHP as an option, which is actually pretty nice, since it can be a pain to set up under IIS.

Answer 5

I actually don't know about other developers but I no longer install IIS on my dev machine. Visual Studio .Net has a built in web server for most testing and for heavier testing I usually deploy to a testing server machine. I also find that SQL Server Express really bogs down my dev machine so I usually just leave that on the testing server as well though I can see more developers disagreeing with me there.

Here's the stuff I install on my dev machines:

Visual Studio 2008
The most basic FTP client I can find (FTP Explorer is my favorite)
CloudPad
WireShark
Adobe Photoshop (I still use 7.0. Works great for what I do.)
SQL Server Management Tools

The order of these is not important.

Answer 6

I usually start with Visual Studio because that contains all it's dependencies. Then SQL Server, Office 2007, then .net Framework 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 as this should patch everything related, and the SP2 for Office.