I've just installed Windows Server 2008 RC1 on a VM in order to see what I need to do to get "WSS 3.0+SP1" to work on it.

I first installed Windows Server 2008 months ago and I don't remember thinking that it was any different (or in typical MS words "a different installation experience") to installing Windows Server 2003 and then adding WSS 3.0.

Maybe my memory is going but I certainly think I would remember some of the decisions I needed to make this time.

This post by the way is only going to be an "as I remember" post. I can see that I'm going to have to install this thing many many times with different parameters before I can get a real grasp of what is really needed before you install WSS 3.0.

The first choice is that you can decide between Core functions only and Full. Now I don't know about you, but I had no idea whether installing Core functions only would mean that WSS 3.0 would install or run or not, so I installed Full.

That in turn just lies there (at first not accepting that I have network connection until I re-boot it but that's maybe because it was installed in a VM) and you need to specify the Applications Server role.

Now that was all you needed to do with Windows Server 2003 before running the .Net Framework install and installing WSS 3.0, but now with 2008 it *appears* that this doesn't include IIS support and so you are - shall we say - "encouraged" to install "Web Services (IIS)" (some such name) as well.

Around this point you are presented with sub-menus for those two main things and, yes, I did click a few things almost at random (well they looked as if I might need them).

Also at some point around here (maybe one of those sub-menus in fact) you could X for the installation of .NET Framework 3.0, so that's no longer a seperate install but is part of Windows Server 2008.

Anyway all that lot was set to churn around for a while and eventually was done and (with or without a re-boot ? I must really learn to write these things down) then I could run the standard "WSS 3.0+SP1" installation after which I had of course the configuration wizard phase and after that (perhaps not "of course") a working WSS 3.0 default site.

I'm ashamed to say that although I "could" run the standard '"WSS 3.0+SP1" installation' what I actually first tried to run (and twice too) was the WSS 3.0 SP1 download which not surprisingly didn't find a product it could update and posted a message to that effect. My excuse is that this installation was working on a Mac behind my back while I was also doing work on my work machine and thus I was distracted, but TWICE ??

So there you have it. Obviously I'm going to have to do this install again and write down exactly what I installed. Then once more missing one thing out and seeing if the installation still went through (and so on). I'll also need to do this for both the core and the full version - although I think I'll go to hunt for some documentation on the core version first, I'm not that mad.

So lot's of "fun" ahead and by the time I've finished I'll have to do it all again for the RTM version.

P.S. I first tried to install this on VMWare Fusion (which is the Mac equivalent of VMWare workstation) and it complained about missing drivers and wouldn't install. So I installed it in Parallels and there at the same point in the install it just went straight to the screen that asked for the MSDN code. Thus proving that sometimes it is good to have two completely different sets of Virtual Machine software available even though the machine has fits if one VM from each system is running at the same time (but that might well be caused by memory shortages as it doesn't exactly crash).

P.P.S. Later: (much later) A fellow MVP confirmed that WSS 3.0 would install on the core system. Something about not being able to install .Net Framework on the core version. So what *can* you do with the core version I wonder ?