New on Maarten Balliauw's blog today there's a post looking at FastCGI and how you can access the ServiceConfiguration settings for Azure from your PHP Windows applications.

While working on a sample PHP application hosted on Windows Azure, I found that it is nearly impossible to retrieve information from the Windows Azure ServiceConfiguration.cscfg file. Also, it is impossible to write log messages to the Windows Azure Web Role. Well, both are not 100% impossible: you can imagine dirty hacks where you let a ASP.NET page do something from PHP and stuff like that. But how about a clean solution? How about...A PHP extension module?

The extension (dll, source) lets you call methods like "azure_get_config" and azure_getlocalresourcepath" to pull information directly from your Azure installation.