This recent article on the Redmond Developer News site looks at a partnership one of their largest local businesses, Microsoft, has with Zend and the work they're doing with PHP. They ask "what's next" for these two companies and their future of Microsoft in the community.

Despite speculation that Microsoft would make an announcement around its Silverlight runtime environment at last month's fourth annual Zend/PHP Conference and Expo (ZendCon) in Santa Clara, Calif., the company kept a relatively low profile.

They do mention the collaboration that Zend and Microsoft have already done and note that going forward there will be more initiative to get Windows and PHP to work even better for desktop applications.

On his blog, Tomas Petricek shows how to create Silverlight applications inside of PHP using the Microsoft development tools.

Shortly Silverlight is a cross-browser platform that can be used for developing client-side components that run in the web browser and contain rich media, graphics and can interactively communicate with the user. The language that can be used for writing Silverlight code can be in general any .NET language, so our goal is to allow using PHP by making Phalanger compatible with Silverlight.

He has two demo applications - a simple car app and a helicopter game - he uses as examples. He focuses on the simpler of the two, the car demo, and gives the XAML source, the code for the PHPX file and talks some about the method of deployment that'd need to be used to get the app out to others.

You can download the complete source for the examples (including the Phalanger Silverlight runtime) as well.