In this recent blog post to the PHPClasses.org website, Manual Lemos looks at how Microsoft is making a move to be more involved with the PHP community (as a result of some things discussed at this year's Microsoft Web Developer Summit and an interview with a member of the Microsoft OSS Labs staff).

Lately Microsoft has got closer to the PHP world. Not only they have been sponsoring several PHP events, but they also have contributed code in the form of a patch to ADODB PHP package, which is LGPL licensed, to make it work better with Microsoft SQL server, among other initiatives. [...] For the rest of the people that will not be able to attend to such events, I thought it would be interesting to do a small interview [...] so I contacted Microsoft OSS Labs people and Tom Hanrahan kindly offered to give this interview.

They talk about opinions on the Open Source initiatives Microsoft is making, the FastCGI module, IIS, the customer focus Microsoft is taking and the PHP 5.3 push.

According to the O'Reilly Port 25 blog, there's been a new release of the FastCGI component for Microsoft's IIS web server - FastCGI 6.0 - and how it works with things other than IIS7 and Windows Server 2008.

f you read Sam Raimi's How open source has influenced Windows Server 2008 and Dominic Sartorio's Dominic Sartorio on SpikeSource and Open Source Interoperability blog entries on Microsoft’s Port 25 site, you might wonder if FastCGI for PHP only works with Windows Server 2008 and IIS7. Fortunately, that is NOT the case. Head over to http://iis.net/php where you can find and download FastCGI for IIS 6.0 on Windows Server 2003.

He also points out a video tutorial from Microsoft that can help you get this latest version og FasctCGI up and running on your system.