eWeek reports today that Microsoft is taking the first steps toward extending its support for other scripting languages with a new project to ry to run PHP on .NET.

Known as Phalanger, the project reached Version 2.0 Beta 2 on July 30.

The primary goal of the project, released under Microsoft Shared Source Permissive License, is to enable full functionality of existing PHP scripts on .Net without any modification, Microsoft said. Unlike the original PHP interpreter, Phalanger compiles scripts into MSIL (Microsoft Intermediate Language).

The article goes on to talk about the project, the advantages it has over previous attempts, and where it's headed in the future. You can check out the CodePlex site here.