Maarten Balliauw has a new post to his site showing how you can work with a Azure SQL database directly from the UI of the popular PHP IDE, phpStorm.

PhpStorm provides us the possibility to connect to Windows Azure SQL Database right from within the IDE. In this post, we'll explore several options that are available for working with Windows Azure SQL Database: Setting up a database connection, creating a table, inserting and updating data, using the database console, generating a database diagram and database refactoring.

He includes the instructions and several screenshots showing each step of the above mentioned steps. The database diagram gives you a good overall view of your database structure and allows you to show a visualization of how the tables relate to each other. Note that, though this particular example shows it connecting to an Azure SQL database, the same setup can be used with lots of popular RDBMS out there.

In the latest post to his site, Ruslan Yakushev looks at some simple ways you can debug your PHP-based applications running on a Windows Azure platform.

The need to diagnose and troubleshoot application's failures often comes up during deployment to a hosting environment. Some configuration settings in hosting server may differ from what application expects. Often it is not as easy to figure out the cause of the problem in a hosting environment as it is on a development machine. I found the following techniques useful when troubleshooting errors in PHP applications hosted in Windows Azure Web Sites.

He shares seven different tips, some pretty simple, others a bit more difficult requiring other software to be up and working:

• Using phpinfo()
• Checking the wincache settings
• Looking at your error logs
• Turning on the display_errors setting
• Turning on HTTP logging, detailed errors and failed request tracking in the control panel
• Using XDebug
• Getting the statistics for your ClearDB instance

Maarten Balliauw has a new post to his site showing you how to execute your unit tests (in this case PHPUnit) when you deploy your instance out to the Windows Azure platform.

When deploying an application to Windows Azure Web Sites, a number of deployment steps are executed. For .NET projects, msbuild is triggered. For node.js applications, a list of dependencies is restored. For PHP applications, files are copied from source control to the actual web root which is served publicly. Wouldn't it be cool if Windows Azure Web Sites refused to deploy fresh source code whenever unit tests fail? In this post, I'll show you how.

He creates a super basic script using Silex and writes up a test with some dummy assertions, checking if true equals true. He then steps you through updating the current "deploy.sh" script to add in a call to execute PHPUnit and an "exitWithMessageOnError" statement. This statement kicks it back and causes the deployment to fail when tests don't pass (as seen here).

Maarten Balliauw has a new post today showing you how to work with your Azure site from inside the popular PHP IDE phpStorm.

Working with Windows Azure and my new toy (PhpStorm), I wanted to have support for doing specific actions like creating a new web site or a new database in the IDE. Since I'm not a Java guy, writing a plugin was not an option. Fortunately, PhpStorm (or WebStorm for that matter) provide support for issuing commands from the IDE. Which led me to think that it may be possible to hook up the Windows Azure Command Line Tools in my IDE.

He shows how to add a new "framework" to the IDE for the Azure CLI tools and how to get to a command line from inside the editor. From there you can execute any of the Azure CLI calls just as you would outside of the IDE (like his example, creating a new site called "GroovyBaby").

On the Silver Lining blog (a MSDN Windows Azure related site), there's a recent post showing how you can enable XDebug on your Azure instance to help with debugging your application.

In this post, I'll cover how to run XDebug (including the profiler) in Windows Azure Web Sites. Enabling XDebug in Windows Azure Web Sites is as simple as enabling an extension. However, enabling an extension for the built-in PHP runtime is slightly different than doing so for a custom PHP runtime. I'll cover both scenarios here.

The post is broken up into two sections - one if you're just using the built-in PHP runtime that's already in the instance and another if you're using a custom one of your own. Changes to the configuration files and some screenshots of where to make the updates are included.

Cory Fowler has a recent post explaining how you can enable one of the most recent PHP releases (PHP 5.4) on your Windows Azure website via the " Bring-Your-Own-Runtime" feature.

Much like many other developers, I like to live on the bleeding edge, learning new language features, using the latest tools so naturally one of the things I wanted to see in Windows Azure Web Sites is support for PHP 5.4. I'm pleased to be telling you today in this post that support for Bring-Your-Own-Runtime is now available in Windows Azure Web Sites. Out of the box, Windows Azure Web Sites supports PHP 5.3 as you can see from the snapshot of the portal below. In this article I'll explain how to enable PHP 5.4 in Windows Azure Web Sites.

You'll need to set up and configure an Azure instance to work with (if you don't already have one) and navigate to its management Dashboard once complete. You can then setup a handler mapping that points to an uploaded version of the PHP Windows binary for 5.4 on your document root. Then all that's left is to upload (via FTP or git) this executable and you'll be all set.

Chris Risner has posted the first part of his series looking at mobile geolocation in PHP-based Azure applications as hosted on the Windows Azure service.

The first article in this mini-series on creating geolocation apps with the backend hosted in Windows Azure Websites is going to be a walkthrough of the PHP code that we'll host in Windows Azure. The PHP site will be simple and expose just a few methods. Prior to getting into the code for the service, we need to setup a new website in Windows Azure and set up our database.

He walks you through some of the initial steps to create the PHP side of things - setting up the website instance and database, downloading the Silex PHP framework and the PHP code to get process the latitude and longitude of the current user. Also included is code to help find "interesting" points near the user and code to allow the user to add their own.

In this new tutorial posted to his site Cory Fowler shows you how to set up and deploy a CakePHP-based website to a Microsoft Azure instance.

One day Last week, I set out to get a simple CakePHP site up and running on Windows Azure Web Sites. [...] CakePHP is a framework, which means ideally, there should not be anything specific to get it working on any platform.

He includes a complete guide to getting the framework, a sample "web.config" configuration file (for the Azure instance) and links to some other guides to help you get started using Azure (like deployment with git).

In this new post to his blog Brian Swan shares the process that he and other Microsoft-ers went through to migrate a site off of a LAMP stack and over to one based on Windows Azure. They moved was the SAG awards website because of issues it had seen with outages and slow performance.

In many ways, the SAG Awards website was a perfect candidate for Windows Azure. The website has moderate traffic throughout most of the year, but has a sustained traffic spike shortly before, during, and after the awards show in January. [...] The main challenge that SAG Awards and Microsoft engineers faced in moving the SAG Awards website to Windows Azure was in architecting for a very high, sustained traffic spike while accommodating the need of SAG Awards administrators to frequently update media files during the awards show. Both intelligent use of Windows Azure Blob Storage and a custom module for invalidating cached pages when content was updated were key to delivering a positive user experience.

He walks you through each of the five steps (high-level, obviously) that they took in the migration:

• Export data
• Install Drupal on Windows
• Import data into SQL Azure
• Copy media files to Azure Blob Storage
• Package and Deploy Durpal

Each step comes with some explanation and descriptions of the commands and tools used during the process.

Brian Swan has a new post to his blog about using Azure Federations in your PHP applications:

In a nutshell, SQL Azure Federations introduces an abstraction layer for the sharding of SQL Azure databases. The value in federations lies in your ability to have elastic scalability of the database layer of your application (to match the elastic scalability of the rest of your application when it's running in the cloud). And, one nice thing about the way federations work is that nearly everything can be done with simple SQL commands. Of course, that means that using SQL Azure Federations via PHP should be easy. So in this post, I'll introduce you to SQL Azure federations by showing you how to use them via PHP.

He uses the SQL Server drivers to make the connection to the Azure instance and, based on his included code, creates a federation and tables inside it. He also shows how to insert data into these tables, split up a federation, insert data after this split and how to query a federation member with the filtering on or off.