The main reason for doing so was to test Joomla on Windows so I needed a development server plus I really miss the flexibility of using Apache and the .htaccess file.

I must admit to knowing nothing about WAMP servers so just assumed that I would download and install each component separately but soon realised that there are many preconfigured servers that are very simple to install.

I picked WampServer 2 and found that installing and running the server couldn’t be any easier. Basically if you can install ITunes then you can install this. All the configuration is done for you and the server is controlled from a tray menu that allows you to add PHP modules, Apache modules, edit the http.conf file, add aliases and so on.

The only fly in the ointment for me was that IIS already uses port 80 so I had to change Apache to listen on an alternate port (port 81 in my case), but even this is a very easy job explained here.

From start to finish it probably took 10 minutes to get the server working, and another 2 minutes to set up Joomla. It’s funny that a full open source server with database and server side language is far easier to get going than IIS and ASP.NET that’s for the most part already part of Windows.