My comfort zone is in the LAMP stack. I’ve played around with some WAMP (use Windows as the base OS instead of Linux) stack configurations. But, I’ve never really considered using a WISP (Windows, IIS, SQL Server/Express, and PHP) stack. SpikeSource’s Dominic Sartorio describes their work in a guest Port 25 blog post to provide not only a functional WISP stack but stacks with pre-configured and ready to run Open Source applications like phpBB, WebCalendadr, Gallery, moodle, and Mantis optimized for Windows Server 2008 and taking advantage of FastCGI to provide PHP performance that is supposed to be much better than we’ve seen prior to FastCGI being available for Windows Server and IIS.
Someone recently asked me about installing phpBB. Honestly, I’m not much of a bulletin board user, so I’ve never even installed it on a LAMP stack. I’m giving some thought to at least giving SpikeSource’s turnkey WISP+phpBB a test drive just to see how much time in might save me by going that route instead of installing and configuring it on my usual LAMP environment.
If you want to run phpBB you may want to give a try to BitNami phpBB, which is pure WAMP/LAMP based and compare http://bitnami.org/stack/phpbb. It is free and entirely self-contained, so if you do not like it, just click "uninstall" ;)
The phpbb-WISP stack does everything a phpbb-LAMP stack, like the BitNami stack would do. In fact it does more, in the sense that it provides free updates, now that's something isn't it! Moreover SpikeSource has designed this stack such that you can also install other applications like gallery, mantis etc easily through the updater, without having install another stack for it!