For web developers who dream, build, and host web sites and applications on Microsoft Windows platform, big Pop just made your life (at least your work life) a whole lot easier with the launch of the Web Application Installer.

The Web Application Installer Beta is a software stack designed to help get you up and running quickly with the most widely used Web Applications freely available for the Windows Server platform.

With just a few simple clicks, Web Application Installer (or Web AI for short) will check your machine for the necessary pre-requisites, download these applications from their source location online, walk you through basic configuration items and then install them on your computer.

Sure, developers do these sort of things everyday, and there’s nothing ground-breaking here. But this will surely save you a lot of time, compared with downloading, installing and configuring the individual applications, along with their dependencies, manually. The Web AI tool will also keep your system up-to-date with the latest versions of installed applications, IIS 7.0 Extensions, database, the .NET framework, and other system components.

Life couldn’t be easier than that. Web AI Beta currently provides support for popular ASP.Net and PHP Web applications including Graffiti, DotNetNuke, WordPress, Drupal, OSCommerce, Gallery, and phpBB; with support for more applications coming.

With the myriad of free web apps out there, I don’t see how Microsoft can support every developer’s favorite toy. A smarter thing to do would be to open the tool up to allow application developers to create their own extensions to enable support for their applications. Sure, this is just a beta, but I’ve no doub if Web AI were to come from an open-source-friendly company, community involvement would have been a feature from day 1. Think Chrome.

To use Web AI you need x86 and 64-bit versions of Windows Vista RTM, Windows Vista SP1, or Windows Server 2008. You must also have administrator privileges on your computer to run Web Application Installer Beta, so don’t try this on a shared hosting account. The Web Application Installer also requires a live Internet connection to install applications, as it downloads the various applications from their respective websites.

Note also that this is a Windows environment, so the choice webserver is IIS. From Microsoft’s Web Application Installer FAQs:

Question: I have Apache installed on my host computer. Can I use Apache instead of IIS 7.0 to install the PHP applications?

Answer: No, The Web Application Installer relies on IIS 7.0 extensions to create and run web applications on Windows Server.

Found out more visit Microsot’s Web Platform website, and download the installer from the Web Application Installer Beta website.

No, Bill Gates is NOT going back to school to study, and I hope you were not burned by that title like I was.

This evening after sitting and staring at my computer for heaven knows how long– and not knowing what to do, I gave up and opened Google Reader to find something interesting to read.

That’s when I came across this great article published by Time way back in June 2007, and I wanted to share it.

The article traces Bill Gates’ life from his early high school days to age 22 when he dropped out of Harvard University to go after his passion, and continues through to his phenomenally successful business life, his transitioning out of Microsoft, and his present full-time philanthropy work in improving global education and health.

Gates’ life is a classic American riches-to-even-more-riches story. Growing up the son of a successful Seattle-area attorney, he was a curious fusion of nerd and bad boy. He was a straight-arrow student, but it was never enough to be the best. He had to push everything a little too far — he wanted to win the game and break the rules at the same time to show he was even smarter than the guy who wrote the rules. In high school, he and Allen, with whom Gates would later co-found Microsoft, were obsessed with programming a mainframe owned by a local company. But mastering it wasn’t enough. “We did this thing where we proved you could steal the password file,” Gates says. “Paul and I were banned from using the computer for a year.”

This is a great weekend reading for anyone who likes to explore the making of geniuses.

In the picture below is Bill Gates in 1984 (left) when he dropped out of Harvard, and Bill Gates during commencement ceremonies at Harvard University June 7, 2007.