Integration and Interoperability

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Integration and Interoperability, two sides of the same coin. One of the things we work on across the entire Microsoft Application Platform and product portfolio all-up is insuring the different components work well together, and in fact it’s one of the things I often hear from customers that they like about our platform. For example, the integration we announced between Project Server and the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. At the same time we know most companies have a mix of products and technologies from various vendors, and as such heterogeneous interoperability is very important. We take that second request as seriously as the first and you can learn more about all the work we do in this area at https://www.microsoft.com/interop. This work is ongoing and just last week from Bill Staples was on stage at the Zend/PHP Conference talking about several updates on Microsoft’s support for PHP including a new SQL driver for PHP. I won’t go into all the details, but you can read Zend’s press release.

Make no mistake, .NET is Microsoft’s recommended development platform and we are 100% committed to ASP.NET as a programming model for dynamic web applications. That said, PHP developers commonly develop on the Windows platform and more and more they ask us to be able to leverage specific Windows features like Active Directory or CardSpace. Administrators who work with PHP applications, especially in heterogeneous environments, have expressed a desire to see the simplified management experience that Microsoft infrastructure can offer them. With these points in mind, we realized that we could help. That became the genesis for the Microsoft PHP work. We want to make sure developers, IT Pros, and web hosters who use PHP have a great experience using Windows, SQL Server and other Microsoft technologies.

The work on PHP adds to other interoperability work we’ve been doing along these lines. The JDBC driver for SQL Server is another great example. Our work on Silverlight is another one. The large set of application adapters we ship with BizTalk Server is another. Interop is a key area of investment for Microsoft, and we’ll continue to work hard in delivering customer value here.