I'm a .NET programmer by trade so I'm still learning how to develop in PHP.

The first step is to create a solid development environment. To this end I could use a little help.

I have a brand new clean Windows 7 installation on which to install the necessary components.

I have already downloaded and installed MySQL 5.1.36. That seems to be working well.

I guess my main question is am I better off installing PHP on IIS or using something like WAMP?

Any advice would be helpful. Thanks.

I use XAMPP for all of my personal dev. Quick and easy..

However, in my work environment I've got separate VM's setup to match our production servers' configs. Those VMs act as my testing environments before I push to production.

I have the same kind of thing at work, here is my setup

Windows 7 with PhpED.

VM running Ubuntu 10.04 server (lucid)
- Running Apache webserver (production style)
- php5.3 with the nusphere dbg module and xdebug

Expandrive to map a remote drive over ssh (since the windows 7 implementation of NFS is munted), you could also use samba
- I have my code repo on the dev VM (work policy to not have any code on desktop machines)

Dev MySQL server VM.

-- as for a one box setup - i used to install apache/php/mysql all separately - but xampp or wamp are good solutions.

but my biggest tip would be to mirror production as much as possible!

I use a WAMP setup for all my main development and debugging. Never had a problem with it, except need to be cautious about Windows not having case specific file names. Apache takes a little learning to configure unless you use a control panel to configure it. But I wanted to learn how to configure Apache, so happy with that.

For staging and final testing I then have a couple of LAMP server that emulate what many service providers would use for hosting. However, after 2 years of using PhpEd with WAMP, I have never seen an issue that really required me to use the LAMP server to resolve.

I wouldn't personally using PHP on IIS. I feel more comfortable using something closer to what a service provider would use. Many (most?) PHP sites that I deal with have .htaccess for setting up rewrites, etc. Not sure if IIS does that.

I am also a .NET programmer. PhpEd is a lot better to work with than Visual Studio! I like .NET but PHP is great.