WAMP - a development platform

Uniform Server Zero XI is a free and open source Windows Apache-MySQL-PHP-Perl server suite.   

Essentially, you download and unzip into a directory and you can run the WAMP (no installation).  The only caveat is you need Microsoft VC9 32-bit libraries. This is mentioned in the important readme in the directory.

I'm exploring installing Wordpress with this  Uniform, instructions here . The problem I am having is wordpress' plugins and themes do not download nor update. So I will have to trouble shoot that.

Update : The reason the download for plugins doesnt work is because the CURL dll was not enabled. Need to go to php admin and enable this CURL module.