Although Windows Vista became more popular this year, there are still billions of people using Windows XP Professional for their development environment. I'm going to write an article for those folks that want to learn How to Install DotNetNuke to Windows XP Professional.

Note: If you are using Windows XP Home Edition, forget about reading this tutorial, because you will not able to follow instructions since IIS (Internet Information Services) not provided with this edition. Alternatively you can read bunch of articles about how to enable IIS with Windows XP Home Edition. This can be painful but you may think it would worth trying.

Anyway lets get back to main point of my article.

Ensure that you have following:

• Windows XP Professional Edition (Service Pack 3 Upgrade enabled) [get Service Pack 3 Upgrade]
• Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition (Service Pack 1 Upgrade enabled) [get it here] [register here]
• Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 [get it here]
• Windows Installer 4.5 [get it here] (this is need for SQL Server 2008 Express)
• Windows Powershell 1.0 [get it here]
• SQL Server 2008 Express with Advanced Services (requires registration before download) [register here]
• Mozilla Firefox (optional) [get it here]

Steps:

• Enable IIS 5 through Windows Operating System Media [learn it here]
• Download DotNetNuke Installation/Source Package
• Extract Installation/Source Files to Local Drive
• Configure a Database
• Configure File System & Permissions
• Modify Web.Config file
• Configure Internet Information Services
• Start Using/Developing DotNetNuke

Read the rest of tutorial...