Ivo Jansch mentions an interesting comparison that CNet made on security and levels of vulnerability in a new blog post today. Their article mentions PHP right along side Apple and Microsoft in their list of "most vulnerable software".

This article once again demonstrates the cluelessness that some people have regarding what PHP is. First of all, PHP is not a vendor, so "Apple, Microsoft & PHP" does not make much sense. Furthermore, the only reason PHP even is mentioned in this context is that Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress appear in the list. So PHP, a programming language, gets blamed for the security flaws that are in these packages.

By their logic (applications written in a language on the list means the language is more insecure), they should have marked C as a more insecure language given the ratio of PHP to C software.

According to this post on O'Reilly's ONLamp.com website, Microsoft has released a new five page PDF file titled "PHP on Windows: Community Involvement Improves Performance" discussing the relationship between the software giant and the language over recent years.

The first effort described is the partnership between Microsoft and Zend that resulted in the development of the FastCGI Extension that essentially allowed PHP to be a first-class citizen when used on a Windows Server with IIS. The second effort described is the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP developed internally by the SQL Server team.

They also mention Phlanger and the PHP for Microsoft Ajax projects.

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.

Ivo Jansch has been attending the php|tek 2008 conference this past week and some things have come to light about the rumors between Zend and Microsoft. One of his latest posts sheds some light on how Microsoft responded (as answered by Joe Stagner)

Joe had an interesting presentation, he kept it short and to the point, and had the majority of his time dedicated to Q&A. Naturally, being in a PHP audience, the questions were about Yahoo, Zend, Microsoft's open source policies.

Obviously, questions were asked about two things - the Zend buyout and whether or not they have stopped talks with Yahoo. The answer to the first was a "no, we're not doing that" and the second was a more vague "we're not done talking to them" sort of answer. Another discussion included Microsoft's contributions to the Zend Core - how they're handled and if they're contributed back.

Following up on some previous comments about Zend possibly lining itself up for a buyout, John Coggeshall has posted some of his thoughts on the matter being one of the ones that used to be "on the inside" of the company.

Zend has laid off approximately 25% of their R&D staff in at attempt to become cash-flow positive and potentially line themselves up for an acquisition. I don't have any hard figures as to what that means but I'd estimate that Zend's recovered somewhere between $6-8M in revenues [...] which is why Everyone I've spoken to who is familiar with the subject considers the lay-offs a positive thing.

He goes through the potential list of buyers that have been mentioned so far (Microsoft, IBM, Yahoo!, Facebook) and gives his "why" or "why not" reasons for the probability for each to make the purchase.

He also comments on the rumor of Andi and Zeev's recent trips up to Seattle...

According to some details over on TechCrunch there's a few rumors being started that Zend ("the PHP company") is looking to sell.

Israeli startup Zend Technologies has fired 25 percent of its R&D team (at least ten people), as well as others across the company, in an attempt to become cash flow positive, says a source close to the company.

The official Zend word is that yes, there have been layoffs but no, they cannot comment on the reasoning behind them. Several big names are being thrown around for possible buyers - Microsoft, IBM and Oracle - who have all shown interest in the past.

On the Microsoft adCenter website, Walter Poupore has made a few posts to his blog about integrating PHP with various parts of the adCenter technology. Topics include:

• How to Check the Status of an Ad Group in PHP (V5)
• How to Create Keywords in PHP (V5)
• How to Create Ads in PHP (V5)
• How to Create Ad Groups in PHP (V5)

Check out his blog listing for more.

On the Developer Tutorials site, there's an article talking about the integration that can be made with PHP6 and .NET Visual Studio:

PHP, .net and Silverlight will be integrated out of the box, along with Visual Studio 2008. The project has long been in the works, but our sources have informed us of an impending announcement that PHP 6 will ship with .net.

The glue between them is a part of the phlanger project.

In a new blog entry, Michael Kimsal points out a driver that Microsoft has released (during the end of last year) that allows PHP5 applications to connect directly to a SQL Server database.

This isn't replacing freetds any time soon. I guess I'm still wondering what the market for "PHP apps deployed on Windows talking to SQL Server" really is - most of the shared hosting accounts I've seen, even on Windows, offer MySQL or Access as the database.

He also points out a video that was shot of the development team talking about the driver (here's their blog too).

Tony Bibbs, in the wake of last week's surprise from Microsoft to Yahoo, has posted a few of his thoughts on the matter.

I woke up this morning to the news of a $44 billion buy-out offer from Microsoft for Yahoo!. This is being covered from all angles in various tech sites like Slashdot but I think the one angle I haven't seen yet is what does this mean for PHP?

He mentions the work that Microsoft and Zend have done to push PHP support on the OS (check out this email too) and he wonders what the final impact of it all could mean for the language - will things change drastically if Microsoft becomes a major player in the PHP world or would they stay behind the scenes and give the community the support it might need.