If you’ve been following all the action on github – a colleague (krisw) and I have been building a high level cassandra client for C# & .NET (Hector Sharp).

We’re still quite young in development and you can see our to-do list is full of funny things such as ‘make compile’.

One of the things I love about cassandra is that being built in java, We can run a little dev server on windows to test this. Below are the steps to install Cassandra on a Windows environment & Set up a basic server.

1. Install Java 6 on your machine (Sun Repo)
2. Download Cassandra ( Version is 0.5.1 at time of writing ) & Extract to a directory (I used C:\cassandra)
3. Set the following Path variables
   - JAVA_HOME (To the directory where you installed java [ note not that bin directory ]
   - CASSANDRA_HOME (to the directory you extracted cassandra to, in my example C:\cassanda\)
4. Modify your cassandra config file as you like ( in my example c:\cassandra\conf\storage-conf.xml)
5. Run cassandra! Open a cmd or powershell and run the batch file in your cassandra\bin folder
6. Verify Cassandra is running, open a cassandra-cli from the cassandra\bin folder and try connecting to your new server.