Brian Swan has posted the second part of his series looking at the difference between the MSSQL driver and the SQLSRV drivers for connecting to SQL Server databases from PHP (part one can be found here). He gets a bit more detailed in this second post.

I'm aiming to provide a high-level comparison that you might use if you were considering moving to the SQLSRV extension, but I think there is also some interesting information if you are just curious about the differences. [...] In cases where a short note wasn't enough (and there were several of these), I've provided relevant links to topics in the SQLSRV documentation.

He talks about things that one offers that the other doesn't, like prepared statements (sqlsrv) and working with stored procedures (mssql). He also mentions error handlng, persistent connections and scrollable cursors in sqlsrv. Finally he gets into a one-to-one function comparison of the two drivers with the sqlsrv function list coming up a bit short compared to the features of the more recend (and well-supported) mssql driver.

Microsoft is back with another round of their Ultimate Coder Battle for Canadian developers wanting to create Windows-based PHP applications for some great prizes (like a Dell computer makeover or a Dell notebook).

Now's your chance to put those skills to the test, going toe-to-toe with Canada's best and brightest web developers during the FTW! Coding Competition. Choose your weapon...ahem...language and platform to develop the next great Canadian Web App. Walk ten paces, turn, and…dazzle the country with your incredible new app!

You can get the full details about the competition from the FTW Coding Competition site including information on the rules, what kind of platform your application needs to run on and what kind of data it needs to use. The deadline for signups is April 20th, 2010 so get those ideas in and get started developing!

In a new post to his blog Brian Swan compares the database drivers for MSSQL and SQLSRV by what they have to offer and what the real differences are to your applications.

In this post I want to begin looking at some of the differences between the two drivers and perhaps gain an understanding of why the mssql driver continues to be used (although I have some good guesses). There are lots of comparison points between the mssql and sqlsrv drivers. I'll break my comparison into two posts, focusing on high-level differences in this post and then dive into an API comparison in the next post.

This first of the two parts looks at some of the differences between the two - the Microsoft support for the sqlsrv driver vs community-driven mssql and the fact that they're very different "under the hood" (see this diagram).

Brian Swan has a new post to his MSDN blog today with links to a few good PHP-based CodePlex projects that he thinks look pretty useful for the development community out there.

Admittedly, I'm interested in some of these projects [tagged with PHP] purely out of curiosity, but some of them actually look useful. I won't claim that these are the best of the PHP projects on Codeplex (hence the question mark in the title), but here are some that piqued my interest and that I plan to check out.

The projects in his list are include PHP LINQ classes, Virtual Earth integration and the Zend Framework DB adapter for Microsoft SQL Native Client.

In a new post to his blog Klaus Graefensteiner talks about one of the fastest ways to get WordPress installed and running on a Windows 7 platform - the Web Platform Installer.

his is the first installment of a series of blog post called the WIMPinator Chronicles that describe how to setup a PHP development environment for Windows 7 and IIS 7.5. In this part we are taking advantage of a very cool tool called the Web Platform Installer. With a few clicks you will be able to install and configure IIS7, PHP, MySQL and a Wordpress blog on your local Windows 7 computer.

With the Web Platform Installer, the installation of the needed software is just a few clicks (and configuration settings) away. Windows users will feel right at home. His screenshots guide you through the whole process and you'll end up with IIS, PHP and MySQL installed to run the WordPress blogging platform on your local machine.

Maarten Balliauw has an invitation from Microsoft to all of the PHP developers out there - come be a part of Jump In!, a European developer's camp aimed at bringing the two worlds - PHP and Microsoft - closer together.

The Jump In! Developers' Camp is designed primarily for open-source application developers who are interested in increasing their skills in a range of specific areas. Here they will be able to experiment with ways of combining open-source technologies with Microsoft products to optimize applications.

Experts will be on hand to provide advice on building applications on Microsoft platforms (like Azure, IIS and Silverlight). The developers who create the most "buzz" around their applications will be selected to spend four days at the Panorama Resort & Spa Feusisberg in Switzerland April 6th through the 9th or 10th. The contest is only open to Europeans so if that's you and the idea of it all sounds interesting, head over to the Jump In! site and sign up now!

For anyone wanting to take those first steps into running PHP applications on an Azure platform, you should check out a new post from Josh Holmes. He describes the process of getting it working from a command-line approach.

I thought we could kick it up a notch [from his previous post] and get PHP running in Azure leveraging the command line tools. The primary thing that we need to do is to copy the PHP bits up with the rest of your deployment and configure the FastCGI handler to know where the PHP interpreter can be found.

Once you get PHP installed testing it out is just a matter of getting his test page in the right directory, updating one of the configuration files (web.roleconfig), creating the Config/Definition files and packaging it all up with cspack. All of the contents for the sample configuration files and a screenshot of the fnal output are included.

Brian Swan has a new post to his MSDN blog today with a list of ten great Microsoft+PHP references (including one or two that don't belong to Microsoft!)

As I've learned (and continue to learn) PHP and Microsoft technologies, I've found some very helpful resources on the web. But, they are sometimes hard to find, and they certainly aren't usually found in one place. So, before I begin drilling into some of the things I suggested in my first post, I thought I'd take a stab at consolidating the resources that I've found to be especially helpful.

Sites included in the list are things like:

• IIS.net's guide for running PHP on IIS
• Accessing SQL Server from PHP
• StackOverflow's section on PHP
• the blog of Ruslan Yakushev a project manager for the IIS team

Both Don Raman and Ruslan Yakushev have posted about the latest release of the WinCache caching tool from Microsoft for Windows-based PHP installations.

Don comments:

Based on the user's feedback (which was all positive) we decided to release WINCACHE 1.0.1 today. I would advise everybody using WINCACHE to switch to the new stable version even if you are not seeing any problem with current builds. This version has got a critical fix and is good enough reason to upgrade to the newer bits.

Fixes in this release include problems with require_once, some pathing problems, a few changes to the wincache.php file and a few other smaller changes to help with the overall stability. You can download this latest release from the project's SourceForge page. However, if you want a thread-safe version, you'll need to compile it yourself.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted about a PHP developers summit happening in the Philippines in partnership with Microsoft.

In partnership with Microsoft Philippines, PHP User Group Philippines presents PHP Developers Summit 2010 on January 30th. We are inviting you to come and join us in this gathering of the country's best tech-talents, professionals and web developers promoting the use of PHP and open source solutions in the enterprise and schools.

Speakers include Dominick Nowell A. Danao, Rodney C. Jao, Alec Joseph Rivera and Rick Bahague, Jr. on topics from IIS7, Git, the WinCache extension and scaling web applications. There's still time to register if you'd like to reserve your spot. The event is happening in the Grand Ballroom at the Hotel Rembrandt and will cost between 1,200-1,500 PHP to attend this one-day event.