Elizabeth Smith has had an adventure - one where she's tried to get something (seemingly) simple to work on a less than simple platform. She tried to compile PHP 5.2 on Windows with a .Net toolkit. This is her story:

For three days I fought with compiling PHP5.2 on windows. The point was to be able to compile PHP-GTK2 a little more often. [...] I'm always up for learning something new and I thought I had enough google skills and entry level knowledge to get things going. Alas, it has all failed.

She recounts the steps she followed in her effort to get the setup working, including setting up the compile environment (no small task thanks to dependencies for Visual C++ Express Edition) and getting down into the PHP. This causes troubles of its own - from command line options not getting passed to external library dependencies - with the ultimate unfortunate result.

All the way to the end and the linker fails AGAIN. What the heck? So I start doing some searching...turned off EVERYTHING and tried to build and ended up with weird iconv and libxml errors - even with disable-all.

nothing works.