This post on the PHPImpact blog talks about a compiler that helps to bridge some of the gap between PHP and .NET - Phlanger.

Phalanger is a new PHP implementation introducing the PHP language into the family of compiled .NET languages. [...] Phalanger compiles PHP scripts into MSIL (Microsoft Intermediate Language) which can be executed by .NET or Mono runtime.

He mentions some of the features of the tool (including interoperability between .NET and PHP and the ability to use current PHP libraries inside the .NET application). More information can be found on the Phlanger website.

In this new post to his blog, Richard Heyes talks about an example he's come across of PHP being used as backend behind a large marketing project:

I recently read an interesting example at Neil Shearing's internet marketing strategies blog of combining .NET desktop software with a PHP backend.

We all know PHP is often slated by "real programmers" as a scripting language only useful for kiddie's home pages, and its nice to see a serious marketer choosing PHP to power the backend to a serious piece of viral software with the potential to go load-mad.

Richard also points out some of his experience trying to market his software and which of his customers are the ones that would provide the most return (the ones looking for updates) and how he can gather their information more productively to further his project's goals.

From the IBM developerWorks phpblog today, there's a new tutorial on getting PHP to compile/build on a Windows machine from the source - PHP 6 (and PHP 5).

These instructions are intended to cover everything that you need to do to be able to build PHP on a Windows XP system. They may work on other Windows systems, I haven't checked. No prior knowledge is assumed, except how to perform basic operations using the windows command line (eg mkdir, copy) and how to use an editor (eg edit) and no software (other than Windows) is assumed to be installed.

The instructions have been tested with PHP6 and PHP5, the only difference being that any references to ICU can be ignored if you are building PHP5.

The tutorial starts with the download of all needed software - Visual C++, a Windows Server 2003 SDK and the .NET framework. The rest is broken up into three steps:

• getting PHP and the prerequisites to prepare for the build
• customizing the build environment (combining Visual Studio and the SDK)
• performing the actual PHP build (including steps to build resolv.lib and running the compile from the command line).

He also points to Elizabeth Smith's tutorial on compiling on Windows for more information.

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.