We will dive into a cookbook that has been written specifically to address the installation of the Umbraco CMS along with its requirements. The source code for this cookbook is available on GitHub at http://github.com/johnewart/umbraco-cookbook.

Chef cookbooks share the same layout and structure whether they target Windows or other platforms. The primary difference in a cookbook that supports Windows will be that its metadata.rb file declares that the cookbook supports Windows and the recipes contained within the cookbook will support Windows through a combination of Windows-specific resources and conditional logic that may behave differently on the Windows platform. The following screenshot shows the layout of the umbraco cookbook:

Here, you will notice that the cookbook looks just like any other cookbook; it can contain folders for recipes, attributes, templates, resources, providers, and any other Chef resources. In this case, the cookbook only contains some default...