I've been meaning to do a write up on tools for applying patches on Windows but haven't had a chance. For now I'll just leave it at this list.

GNU Commandline Utilities

All of these can be downloaded as setup files that install into C:\Program Files\GnuWin32 (by default) so you'll want to add C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\bin to your system path.

DiffUtils - show differences between files
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/diffutils.htm

CoreUtils - GNU file, shell and text utilities
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/downlinks/coreutils.php

CygUtils - miscellaneous utilities including dos2unix and unix2dos (which you'll need to convert the line endings to keep patch happy)
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/cygutils.htm

Patch - apply a diff file to an original
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/patch.htm

Wget - retrieve files from the WWW
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/wget.htm

GUI Apps

WinMerge - visually compare the text files
http://winmerge.org/

This page provides instructions for a Drupal developer who'd like to install PHP 5 on their desktop computer. The instructions assume that you're running a recent version of Windows (NT, 2000, XP, or 2003). Older version like Windows 95, 98 and Me will not be addressed.

Download

The first step is to download the MySQL Server "Windows Essentials" binaries from the MySQL website at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/. At the time this was written last updated, 5.1.46 was the latest, stable release. The file was named: mysql-essential-5.1.46-win32.msi. Make sure you save the file to a location on your hard drive where you can locate it.

Download

The first step is to download the "Win32 Binary (MSI Installer)" from the Apache Software Foundation's website at http://httpd.apache.org/download.cgi. At the time this was written last updated, 2.2.15 was the latest, stable release. The file was named: apache_2.2.15-win32-x86-no_ssl.msi. Make sure you save the file to a location on your hard drive where you can locate it.

Once you've been developing Drupal modules for any length of time you find that you need to test code on multiple versions of Drupal. The easiest way to do this is have separate Drupal releases running as virtual hosts. In this guide I'll walk though setting up Apache virtual hosts for Drupal 5 and Drupal HEAD. I'm assuming you're running Windows 2000 or greater and that you've already gotten Apache, MySQL and PHP setup and running on your local machine.

With the aim of helping new Drupal developers get setup on Windows, I've created the following guides.

Phlickr uses two several of PHP5's extensions, CURL and SimpleXML. In some cases these two extensions may not be enabled by default.

The first step is verify that the modules are not already being loaded. You view a list of the modules using the following command: