Presentation

In this part different topics were addressed such as Microsoft Software of interest for PHP developers, the forthcoming Internet Explorer 8 and (of course) Silverlight.

Expression

Microsoft apparently has a whole new range of development software called ‘Expression ‘. Akin to Vista there are different flavors and akin to Vista that may cause confusion. Most emphasis was on ‘Expression Web’, a WYSIWYG editor replacing Frontpage. It looked quite decent in it’s own right but it is no IDE like Zend Studio. I think in PHP environments it’s most suited towards front-end developers who are mainly focused on templating.

IE 8

It looks like Internet Explorer 8 will have some very welcome features. (In my opinion just the fact that there will be an IE8 is a good thing as that will make IE6 ‘really old’ and hopefully extinct soon. Good news for anyone involved in CSS and JS coding). For developers interesting features will be:

• JS-debugger with breakpoints and all (no more mystery line-numbers)
• By default a web developer toolbar
• Code profiler (think: Yslow)

Promising indeed. Now what remains on my wish-list is an easy way to run IE6 and IE7 alongside IE8…

Silverlight

On to Silverlight. One can’t but have noticed Microsoft is promoting it’s new web technology. And while Microsoft bashers will probably keep seeing it as ‘Just a M$ alternative to Flash’, it has some very nice features. Apparantly Silverlight is very powerful when it comes to handling video. A fine example was given in the form of last year’s Amstel Gold coverage featuring a single stream showing different camera’s. Another nice feature is Deep Zoom of which two interesting examples were shown: Hard Rock Memorabilia and Yosemite park. Not needed in your typical CMS application but very nice nevertheless.

But what I liked most about Silverlight (besides the obvious show-off examples) was the way it integrates into a HTML page: Silverlight events will be processed by the page’s javascript. This means that when developing RIA’s all of the behaviour scripting can be centralised and will cover both HTML and Silverlight parts of the page. Furthermore, Silverlight object elements can be accessed in a way similar to the HTML DOM. I haven’t yet worked with Silverlight but based on this I expect integration to be smooth.

Live Platform

Final part of the day was about Microsoft’s Live Platform. Different features were showcased, like easily publishing video content by using Expression . Neat in it’s own right but the relation to PHP was as thin as any web service. Most interesting I found the existence of Sky Drive. 25Gb of free storage. I’ll keep that in mind if I need to share the occasional file.

Concluding: Espcially the IIS and Silverlight parts were of real interest from a PHP developer’s perspective. Some of the other subjects were ‘nice to know’ and came across as more ‘promotional’ than ‘informative’. That aside, it looks like Microsoft is well aware of the increasing popularity of PHP. I wouldn’t be surprised if Silverlight will make it’s way into quite some PHP applications.

MS Server 2008 & IIS 7

The IIS 7 part was quite interesting, the most important facts mentioned being:

• Modular instead of Monolithic. The extension architecture allows for extra features to be added to IIS 7. Extensions can be ‘official Microsoft extensions’, ‘unofficial’ (third party, no MS support) or self-developed.
• FastCGI PHP. One of those extensions is FastCGI. Apparently FastCGI re-uses a proces as opposed to classic CGI. For PHP on IIS this means a great performance boost.
• Multiple PHP versions. Per folder, or even per specific script, the PHP executable can be specified so it is easy to run different PHP versions on one server or to test applications on updated PHP versions.
• Delegating access to configuration settings. It looked like it was possible to delegate configuration settings at a very detailed level. Delegation is helped by the introduction of ‘IIS users’. The configuration console can be remotely connected to using the IIS user credentials.
• Bit rate throttling. Very useful if you are hosting large media files.
• Url Rewrite Module. The most notable feature to me was that it allows you to import apache mod_rewrite settings. Very nice.
• Alternate configuration options. For those suffering from RSI (or just not liking icons) there are several other ways of accessing IIS settings: AppCMD, Powershell, .NET namespaces or the XML configuration files.

IIS 7 made a good impression. It looks like some features very important for PHP development are in there. I think for sysadmins it’s very nice that all of the configuration can be done from the CLI as that is better suited for repetitive tasks, tooling and documenting.

SQL server 2008

The SQL server part covered the connecting proces from PHP and the features SQL Server 2008 offers.

For the PHP examples the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP was used. This driver makes available a set of sqlsrv_ functions. In-depth coverage on that subject can be read here. The driver is only available on windows but luckily there are other options: MSSQL extension, ODBC extension, PDO_DBLIB and PDO_ODBC.

Next on was coverage on the Server product itself. The part on reports wasn’t that interesting although the reports created looked very polished. And of course there’s a certain demand for that. :). Furthermore, I think displaying the reports using an iFrame isn’t the type of ‘integration’ PHP developers will get very excited about.

Working mainly with CLI or Php(My/Post)Admin I could see the benefits tools like SQL Server Management Studio and SQL Server Profiler can offer. I think they can be of great help optimising queries.

Of further interest to me were the geography and geometry functions. It was nice to see how easy it is to combine, say, travel distance and other attributes in a single query. I’ve never had to work with geographic data yet but, as co-attendees mentioned a lot of other databases have similar features. For example PostgreSQL has the PostGIS extension and there is some spatial functionality in MySQL too.

SQl Server is probably a very good product but I doubt if it will be used much in ‘blank sheet’ PHP projects. For companies having a MS infrastructure and wanting to jump on the PHP bandwagon options are plenty…

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