Automated software installation for MS Windows?
- by Duncan Bayne
I am currently setting up a Windows development environment (the whole Visual Studio 2010 stack plus plugins on top of Windows 7). This has got me wondering whether there's a Windows equivalent to what I do for dev environment setup in Ubuntu.
It takes literally hours to get a dev environment set up in Windows, involving a lot of manual intervention.
On Ubuntu, I have two shell scripts - one I run as root which configures the system using apt-get (amongst other things), one I run as me which configures my user account. Those scripts live in my private Subversion repository.
To set up a dev environment from scratch requires five commands:
sudo apt-get install -y subversion
svn co http://svn.XXXX.XXX/personal/
cd personal
sudo ./ubuntu_setup_root.sh
./ubuntu_setup_user.sh
The only human intervention required is to pick a root password for MySQL. So it takes only a few minutes of human attention to go from a vanilla Ubuntu installation to a full development environment with the latest builds of everything, perfectly tailored down to shortcut keys and wallpaper.
Is there an equivalent process for Windows? In an ideal world it'd be something trivially scriptable using C# Script or Powershell, which could live in source control & make use of a repository of ISOs downloaded from MSDN ...
