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Microsoft has announces their Web Platform Installer beta (Web PI) and it includes Gallery support!

I haven't tested this yet, but Web PI should make it much easier to install, amongst others, Gallery on your IIS 7 with FastCGI and PHP.

Gallery even has it's own download page on microsoft.com

Seems like something I need to play with ASAP.

Microsoft has just released FastCGI for IIS6. For Microsoft and the PHP Community this is important, as this enables hosting companies and PHP developers full support for reliable PHP hosting on production Internet Information Services 6.0 (IIS 6) Web servers.

To quote Eric Woersching from Microsoft (Technical Product Manager IIS):

I think this is a big step for Microsoft as it symbolizes how we’re trying to start doing more for the PHP community.

• FastCGI has been officially released for IIS6 with full Microsoft support
• FastCGI is a free download and you can get it at http://www.iis.net/php
• FastCGI allows IIS to reuse CGI processes for multiple requests to PHP applications, enables PHP hosting on Windows with significantly improved reliability and performance.
• Microsoft is embracing the PHP community and to help bootstrap early adopters of PHP on Windows, we’ve been validating the popular PHP applications on Windows and publishing walkthroughs that give step by step instructions on how to setup and install the most popular PHP apps on top of FastCGI and IIS/Windows.

Gallery is one of the PHP applications that has been given it's own walkthrough on the Microsoft site check out setup instructions for Gallery. Who would have thought we would see Gallery 2 setup instructions on a Microsoft site?

This comes after both Chris Kelly and Jesse Mullan represented Gallery at the recent Microsoft Web Developer Summit. Chris has also done his own writeup about the FastCGI release. Another thing that Microsoft has agreed to provide the Gallery team with, is testing resources. Details are still being worked out, but Microsoft has made it very clear that they intend so help the Gallery team develop and test their applications on the Microsoft platform including IIS and MSSQL. It will be very interesting to see the final testing setup and what kind of support we will be receiving.

So far it looks very promising.