PHP on Windows Resources from DPC Presentation

My “PHP on Windows” presentation at the Dutch PHP Conference (presented today…whew!) focused on the recent improvements in interoperability between PHP and Microsoft Technologies (my slides are attached to this post). If you attended, please rate my presentation at https://joind.in/1650. There was no way I could have covered all the improvements that have been made in the last couple of years, so I chose three: improvements in IIS (FastCGI features and WinCache), SQL Server Reporting Services (using the SSRS SDK for PHP), and Microsoft’s cloud offerings (Windows Azure and SQL Azure). A couple of sub-topics were the SQL Server Driver for PHP (which makes moving an application to a SQL Azure backend easy) and all the PHP-related tools that are available on CodePlex. Even though I only focused on three areas, I felt like I had to fly through the presentation. So, in case I went too fast through the last couple of slides (or in case you weren’t there at all), here is the list of resources from my presentation:

Downloads

• Web Platform Installer (Web PI) : I didn’t highlight this in my presentation, but it is the easiest way to install many of the technologies I used in my presentation (PHP, SQL Server Express, IIS/FastCGI features, WinCache, SQL Server Driver for PHP, and more). There are, however, two catches:
  • The Web PI doesn’t currently install PHP 5.3 (which is optimized for Windows)…it installs PHP 5.2.13. The Web PI team is working hard to make PHP 5.3 an option in future releases.
  • The Web PI doesn’t currently install SQL Server Express with Advanced Services. See the next link to get this version of SQL Server Express.
• SQL Server Express with Advanced Services: This is the version you need to install to get SQL Server Reporting Services (and a few other “advanced” features, like Filestream support).
• SQL Server Driver for PHP
  • v1.1 source code
  • v1.1 binaries
  • v2.0 binaries (beta)
• IIS/FastCGI Updates: The latest FastCGI and IIS module updates for any version of IIS.
• WinCache
  • v1.1 (beta) API
• SSRS SDK for PHP: Tools for consuming SQL Server Reporting Services reports.
  • This blog post basically covers what I did in my presentation: https://blogs.msdn.com/b/brian_swan/archive/2010/05/04/getting-started-with-sql-server-reporting-services-ssrs-and-php.aspx
• SQL Azure Migration Wizard: Tool for migrating a SQL Server database to SQL Azure. 
  • This blog post should get you started with SQL Azure: https://blogs.msdn.com/b/brian_swan/archive/2010/02/12/getting-started-with-php-and-sql-azure.aspx
• SQL Azure vs. SQL Server: Whitepaper examining the differences between SQL Azure and SQL Server.
• Windows Azure Command Line Tools for PHP Developers:  Tools for packaging an application for deployment to Windows Azure.
  • Again, this blog post basically covers what I did in my presentation: https://blogs.msdn.com/b/brian_swan/archive/2010/06/01/using-the-windows-azure-command-line-tools-for-php.aspx

Learn More

• SQL Server Driver for PHP Team blog
• Interoperability Team blog
• Josh Holmes’ blog
• Zach Owens’ blog
• Ruslan Yakushev’s blog
• Kanwaljeet Singla’s blog
• IIS site for PHP on Windows
• Learn more about Windows Azure and SQL Azure
• Check out (and contribute to) the great projects on Codeplex
• Learn more about the Microsoft Web Platform

I hope those are helpful.

Thanks.

-Brian

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