On the PHP on Windows section of the DZone.com there's a new post from Naveen Balani about the WebMatrix tool from Microsoft and why PHP developers should be taking notice of it.

Gone are the days when PHP developers had to turn away business because the clients used Windows Servers. If you are a PHP developer and have been looking for a cost-effective and easy way to begin developing web sites for clients on Windows, WebMatrix is your new best friend. With WebMatrix, Microsoft has created a new point of entry into the world of Windows web development. WebMatrix allows you to create web sites quickly and in your preferred web programming language. This article discusses what WebMatrix can do for you as a PHP developer.

They talk about installing WebMatrix, creating a sample website project, some sample code to drop inside and how to publish the application to your server. There's even a bit on using an existing application to build off of. Their example uses WordPress, the popular blogging application.

Ruslan Yakushev has posted some quick instructions on how to get Xdebug, the popular PHP debugger, enabled in the recently released WebMatrix tool from Microsoft.

When WebMatrix is used to build or modify a PHP-based web application the debugging tasks can be greatly simplified if Xdebug extension is used. This post explains how to install and use Xdebug extension with WebMatrix.

It's a simple six-step process (complete with screenshots) that shows you how to enable it in your php.ini, test that it's working with a simple buggy script and configure both the location to the correct DLL file and an output directory to create cachegrind files.

Ruslan Yakushev has a new post about a major update to the latest beta release of the Microsoft WebMatrix tool - the update of the PHP version to support 5.3 and the inclusion of PEAR.

WebMatrix Beta 3 release has been announced recently. This release includes many new cool features that are described in release announcement and in the Web Deploy team blog. In addition to all those improvements, WebMatrix Beta 3 has much better support for PHP.

The updates make it possible to use 5.3 (prior versions only supported 5.2.x), an update to allow PHP to be enabled on a new empty site and the inclusion of PEAR whenever PHP is installed. He includes a few screenshots and instructions to help guide you through the process of getting 5.3 set up. PEAR is automatically installed when you install this latest PHP update.

New on his blog today Brian Swan has posted an interview with Eli White (no, not that Eli White) a PHP developer and intern on the ASP.NET team there at Microsoft with some of his thoughts on Web Matrix and Razor from the perspective of someone with some PHP knowledge.

I had the good fortune of meeting Eli White, a junior at University of Washington and a PHP developer of 7 years, for the first time at the local Seattle PHP Meet Up a few months ago. [...] I had lunch with Eli last week and we talked about the work he’s doing on Web Matrix and Razor. I thought his perspective as a PHP developer on Web Matrix and Razor were worth sharing...

They talk some about Eli's background, including how he got into PHP development, what some of his initial challenges were in getting into the language, and - more on the Microsoft side - how he got involved in the ASP.NET team and the Web Matrix/Razor projects from there.

Brian Swan has a recent post to his blog looking at how to create PHP websites with the help of the WebMatrix tool - a software bundle that provides you with a web service and a database to build your applications on.

As I read those posts (and others), I was left wondering about the extent of PHP support in WebMatrix (which is what I'll look at in this post). As it turns out, PHP is fully supported, but it requires a little bit of work up front in this beta release of WebMatrix (a smoother experience for PHP developers is planned for the final release).

He steps you through the install of the WebMatrix tool (including screenshots) and how to create a sample site. Adding PHP support is as simple as including another block of XML in the configuration file for FastCGI support. Open up a new PHP file and your code should be interpreted like normal.