The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has released their latest community interview today, this time with Mark Brown, a community evangelist for Windows Azure.

They talk some about the Windows Azure product and what kind of functionality it can currently offer PHP developers and applications. He talks some about the operating systems they've made available on the platform and the "community" virtual machine images. These run anything from a regular LAMP stack out to installed applications (like Drupal or WordPress). They also discuss the Azure target markets and how it can help make developers' lives easier.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly. You can also subscribe to their feed.

On the php|architect blog there's a new post with the recording of the webcast from Ruslan Yakushev and Mark Brown of Microsoft talking about increasing PHP performance on IIS.

In this session Mark Brown and Ruslan Yakushev will talk about the work being done at Microsoft to increase the performance of PHP applications on Windows and IIS. This includes some recent advancements with the FastCGI module that enables PHP to run on Windows and IIS as well as soon to be released WinCache 1.1 that is going even further to provide PHP applications exceptional performance on the Windows and IIS platform.

You watch it right in the page or you can download the mp4 file and watch it whenever.

Ruslan Yakushev has posted some of the slides and the questions from their "PHP Performance on Windows" webcast the other day (a part of the TEKX webcast series). He co-presented with Mark Brown.

There were a number of question at the end of the webcast that we did not get to answer due to lack of time. This blog post provides answers to those questions.

Questions were asked about php_mssql.dll removal, .htaccess on IIS, adding wincache support for Zend_Cache, a Microsoft-developed toolkit for PHP and quite a few more. If you missed the presentation, you can see the slides here and keep checking back on the TEKX webcast page for the video/audio download.