I had some experience installing Coldfusion 8 on a Windows Server 2008 box last week. I captured some screenshots so I could do this brief tutorial.

First, Microsoft has locked down everything in Server 2008. Thankfully they've been a bit smarter about it this time. Rather than installing everything by default and prompting you to "cancel or allow" it they have introduced server roles. This means that if I want to setup a webserver I need only install the pieces of software for hosting webpages.

With that in mind we need to do a bit of preinstallation work in order to make the CF8 install as smooth as possible.

1. Open Server Manager
2. Expand the Roles node in the left pane
3. Click Add Role Service
4. Select the ISAPI Filters and IIS 6 Management Compatibility roles
5. Install Coldfusion 8 normally

By performing the above preinstallation steps the CF installers should work normally setting up the appropriate script maps and ISAPI entries.

Those running 64-bit Server 2008 with 32-bit Coldfusion will need to take a couple of additional steps to get CF8 running.

NOTE: Adobe has released CF8 in a 64-bit flavor but only for the Enterprise/Developer edition.

Perform the following steps to enable 32-bit applications in IIS7.

1. Open up the Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager
2. Expand the server node and select Application Pools
3. Select the DefaultAppPool and then Advanced Settings
4. Ensure that Enable 32-bit Applications is set to True

Failing to enable 32-bit applications results in 500 Internal Server errors.