Helloooooooooooo, is anybody here?

Well, to start off with, we got a great response to our PHP survey and ….

But wait, first things first, let us start off with introductions. I joined the team recently as the Program Manager for this driver. I’ve worked on several technologies in my career and very excited to be a part of this great team and look forward to working with you all, the PHP developer community!

PHP and its ecosystem is new to me, so I’ve been ramping up over the last few months as well as helping the team as best I can on the next version of the driver – drinking from the fire hose, so to speak. Some of you may have seen a few posts on the PHP driver forums on Codeplex and MSDN to address your issues/concerns. It’s been fun so far and I’m looking forward to the CTP of our next release.

Now, this begs the question, what is it that we are working on? And, equally important, what are you folks doing with the feedback provided in the previous PHP survey (this blog post)?

So let’s talk about the survey first. We really appreciate the great response, the total responses were almost twice the as much as any previous survey and we got some great feedback that helped us readjust our priorities for our feature set for our next version. The feedback also triggered another survey on a "Multi-platform ODBC driver for SQL Server" survey late in February, for which there was great response from the PHP community. We’ve find that surveys are a great way to get effective and structured feedback, so do expect more in the future.

Okay, enough about that and talk about the new features being added to the new version. As I posted on the “What's the roadmap for the SQL Server driver” thread on our MSDN forum, we can’t always openly divulge our plans for our next release. Just like we have done in the past, we will release a CTP after which there will be plenty of opportunity to start a dialog that ensures our release version meets our customer and business needs.

While we can’t openly discuss the upcoming version, it is quite probable that there are occasions when we will share details before a CTP for issues or features where need to do so in order to meet our customers’ needs. Just to be clear, by “customers” we mean PHP developers as well as those deploying PHP applications, both are important to us. Since surveys are intermittent events, we’ll continue to use this blog and MSDN forum as a primary means of having a dialog. So do expect more blog activity from us now that we have a little more bandwidth on the team.

Now that I have introduced myself and provided a quick update, it’s time to wrap up this blog and get back to work on our next release – after all, that’s why they send me a paycheck every so often.

Until the next blog …

Ashay Chaudhary

Program Manager

SQL Server Driver for PHP