In this recent blog post to the PHPClasses.org website, Manual Lemos looks at how Microsoft is making a move to be more involved with the PHP community (as a result of some things discussed at this year's Microsoft Web Developer Summit and an interview with a member of the Microsoft OSS Labs staff).

Lately Microsoft has got closer to the PHP world. Not only they have been sponsoring several PHP events, but they also have contributed code in the form of a patch to ADODB PHP package, which is LGPL licensed, to make it work better with Microsoft SQL server, among other initiatives. [...] For the rest of the people that will not be able to attend to such events, I thought it would be interesting to do a small interview [...] so I contacted Microsoft OSS Labs people and Tom Hanrahan kindly offered to give this interview.

They talk about opinions on the Open Source initiatives Microsoft is making, the FastCGI module, IIS, the customer focus Microsoft is taking and the PHP 5.3 push.