The latest issue of the Web & PHP Magazine has been published - Issue #7, "Full Throttle". Articles included in this issue are:

• Introduction into scaling for Big Data: Cory Isaacson's new column
• What can developers learn from the road? - By Arne Blankerts
• How to be an open source rockstar in 7 easy steps - By Jen Kramer
• PHP security for the real world - By Michael Stowe
• Developing Web Applications in Haskell - By Patrick Brisbin
• Speed up your applications using IIS & WinCache - By Arno Hollosi

You can download this latest issue for free as a PDF as well as picking up the past 6 issues with some great PHP-related content inside.

On Dzone.com today there's a new post showing you how to build PHP applications with Visual Studio based on PHP project templates.

Developing web applications with PHP is cool, especially when you have the right development tools and even with more features added in PHP 5.4. But each time I left the comfort of Intellisense in Visual Studio to develop PHP applications using Zend or Netbeans for PHP, I was not always satisfied with those IDEs' code complete features. Thus, I decided to search for any available plugin that will provide this feature in Visual Studio.

The plugin used is on from Jcx.Software Corp. It adds in the PHP templates and Intellisense support for PHP code completion. He also shows how to set up an IIS server to work with it to make it easier to test your application.

Brian Swan has a new post to his blog today showing you how to use caching for performance tuning on your Windows/IIS PHP application. He uses the IIS 7 output caching method instead of an external cacing tool or library.

The IIS output caching module allows you to configure IIS to cache dynamic pages generated by PHP. When a PHP page becomes "hot", the content of the page is cached so that is served without executing the script that generates it. [...] With the IIS Output Caching module you can cache all pages generated by PHP, vary what is cached by query string parameter value, or vary what is cached by header value.

He touches briefly on when he thinks you should use output caching for your applications since it can add extra overhead if it's not actually needed. He suggests turning it on when you have entire pages that don't change often and could benefit from just being displayed as-is. He shows how to enable the caching on IIS and includes some bits of code to show the results. There's a few other handy features he points out too like a file change notification and a configuration for a time interval caching rule.

In a quick post Ruslan Yakushev points out that the PHP Manager for IIS is now available in five different languages to make it even simpler for the non-English speakers out there to use.

A new release of PHP Manager for IIS (version 1.1.2) is available for download. This release includes translations into 5 languages. [...] Note that this release still includes English and it is recommended to upgrade even if you do not need these translations

The new languages are German, Dutch, Turkish, Japanese and Russian and the post thanks each of the community members that helped with the translation. The PHP Manager for IIS is a tool for managing one or more PHP installations on a single IIS server.

Kenny Katzgrau has a recent post on the Code Fury blog talking about the combination of CodeIgniter, IIS, MySQL and MSSQL and how it all works in his installation (after a few small gotchas).

There are a lot of people out there who call themselves "LAMP" developers - short for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. That's the standard configuration for production PHP applications. Recently, I ended up having to build a CodeIgniter application on Windows, IIS, Mysql+MS-SQL, and PHP. Sound like there are bound to be issues? You bet, and it especially hurts because now I'm a real-live WIMP developer. And what made it even more interesting was that due to constraints, I had to develop the application in Ubuntu and deploy to Windows for production.

He includes the list of the "gotchas" that he came across when doing the installation - six of them:

• PHP and MSSQL on Ubuntu
• PHP and MSSQL on Windows
• mssql vs. sqlsrv
• File Permissions and Logging
• No .htaccess Fo' You!
• 2 Databases, 1 Application

In this new post to his blog today Brian Swan includes a video that's perfect for anyone wanting to know more about the PHP Manager for IIS but didn't have the time to get into it.

Last week, Ruslan Yakushev announced the release of the 1.1 version of the PHP Manager for IIS. I thought a tour of the PHP Manager functionality might work best in video format. I'd be interested learning what you think of the PHP Manager itself, but also in knowing what you think of the video format.

He covers me of the basics of the tool (except the installation, you'll have to do that yourself) including linking a version of PHP, managing php.ini settings, error reporting and working with extensions. If you're having trouble viewing it in his post, you can go directly to YouTube for it.

In a new post to his blog Josh Holmes has written up a summary of a talk he and Mark Brown (also of Microsoft) gave about running PHP on IIS and how good the performance is. The summary is a result of their session at this year's Zend/PHP Conference.

Mark Brown and I did a talk at ZendCon last week on how well PHP runs in IIS and more specifically, some things that you should do in order to make it run really well on IIS.

They looked back at the history between IIS and PHP - a bit rocky at times - and how, with IIS7 and improvements to FastCGI, this relations has changed for the better. He mentions WinCache, URL Rewrite, the PHP Manager for IIS and the PHP Interoperability effort Microsoft has started.

Happen to need both ASP.NET and PHP running on the same IIS server? Josh Holmes (and Mark Brown) have you covered with this new presentation posted to Josh's blog.

I got a question the other day about running both ASP.NET and PHP on the same server and whether or not it works. The short answer I gave is "Yes". The longer answer, I'm going to give here. In point of fact, both ASP.NET and PHP work really well on the instance of IIS. They can't share session state but otherwise it's a very peaceful existence.

The slides from the presentation are included in the post. There's also a full tutorial on how to get things set up correctly so that PHP and ASP.NET can play nicely on the same machine.

Brian Swan has posted a new timeline to his MSDN blog today about the road that Microsoft has traveled with PHP to get to where they are today.

This morning I came across this article on PHPDeveloper.org: Blast from the Past - One Year Ago in PHP. That brief look into the past got me to thinking about what Microsoft has done lately toward PHP interoperability. (By "lately", I mean in the last few years.) And, I've been working on a presentation for TechEd in Berlin next month that will, in part, provide a brief overview of Microsoft's efforts toward PHP interoperability and support. So, I thought I'd share a bit of that summary here

The timeline runs from back in 2006 when PHP and Windows/IIS/SQL Server just wasn't much of an option through the FastCGI and SQL Server driver years and finally rounding out with WinCache, PHP 5.3 improvements for Windows and the Azure SDK for PHP.

As Brian Swan mentions in his latest blog post, the PHP Manager product from Microsoft has been officially released for IIS7.

There have been some significant changes in the final release since I wrote about the first beta release a month ago. Not only have several bugs have been fixed, but new functionality has been added. Now the PHP Manager can help you validate and optimize your PHP installations on IIS. [...] You can download x86 and x64 versions of the PHP Manager here: http://phpmanager.codeplex.com/releases/view/53121.

He gives a quick run through of how the tool works by registering a PHP version to work with a certain directory. Then just select the correct "php-cgi.exe" file to use for execution and save it. The PHP Manager tool does the rest. It also tries to help you optimize your setup with a few recommendations on both PHP and IIS settings.