Iwan Luijks has a recent post looking at how you can send email through PHP on Windows via the Apache James server.

eveloping in PHP on Windows? Yep me too! Unfortunatly in opposite to developing on Linux, sending e-mail from PHP on Windows requires some more setup than just a bit of sendmail configuration. In this post I explain how to setup an Apache James Server and use it for e-mailing from PHP, all from and to your localhost.

He walks you through the download and installation and includes the changes you'll need to make to get it up and running correctly. He helps you test it's working correctly and how to get PHP set up and pointing to it for mail delivery. Finally, he has a line of PHP (using mail) to test the install and send a sample message.

Maarten Balliauw has a new post to his site showing how you can work with a Azure SQL database directly from the UI of the popular PHP IDE, phpStorm.

PhpStorm provides us the possibility to connect to Windows Azure SQL Database right from within the IDE. In this post, we'll explore several options that are available for working with Windows Azure SQL Database: Setting up a database connection, creating a table, inserting and updating data, using the database console, generating a database diagram and database refactoring.

He includes the instructions and several screenshots showing each step of the above mentioned steps. The database diagram gives you a good overall view of your database structure and allows you to show a visualization of how the tables relate to each other. Note that, though this particular example shows it connecting to an Azure SQL database, the same setup can be used with lots of popular RDBMS out there.

In the latest post to his site, Ruslan Yakushev looks at some simple ways you can debug your PHP-based applications running on a Windows Azure platform.

The need to diagnose and troubleshoot application's failures often comes up during deployment to a hosting environment. Some configuration settings in hosting server may differ from what application expects. Often it is not as easy to figure out the cause of the problem in a hosting environment as it is on a development machine. I found the following techniques useful when troubleshooting errors in PHP applications hosted in Windows Azure Web Sites.

He shares seven different tips, some pretty simple, others a bit more difficult requiring other software to be up and working:

• Using phpinfo()
• Checking the wincache settings
• Looking at your error logs
• Turning on the display_errors setting
• Turning on HTTP logging, detailed errors and failed request tracking in the control panel
• Using XDebug
• Getting the statistics for your ClearDB instance

Maarten Balliauw has a new post to his site showing you how to execute your unit tests (in this case PHPUnit) when you deploy your instance out to the Windows Azure platform.

When deploying an application to Windows Azure Web Sites, a number of deployment steps are executed. For .NET projects, msbuild is triggered. For node.js applications, a list of dependencies is restored. For PHP applications, files are copied from source control to the actual web root which is served publicly. Wouldn't it be cool if Windows Azure Web Sites refused to deploy fresh source code whenever unit tests fail? In this post, I'll show you how.

He creates a super basic script using Silex and writes up a test with some dummy assertions, checking if true equals true. He then steps you through updating the current "deploy.sh" script to add in a call to execute PHPUnit and an "exitWithMessageOnError" statement. This statement kicks it back and causes the deployment to fail when tests don't pass (as seen here).

Maarten Balliauw has a new post today showing you how to work with your Azure site from inside the popular PHP IDE phpStorm.

Working with Windows Azure and my new toy (PhpStorm), I wanted to have support for doing specific actions like creating a new web site or a new database in the IDE. Since I'm not a Java guy, writing a plugin was not an option. Fortunately, PhpStorm (or WebStorm for that matter) provide support for issuing commands from the IDE. Which led me to think that it may be possible to hook up the Windows Azure Command Line Tools in my IDE.

He shows how to add a new "framework" to the IDE for the Azure CLI tools and how to get to a command line from inside the editor. From there you can execute any of the Azure CLI calls just as you would outside of the IDE (like his example, creating a new site called "GroovyBaby").

The PHP project has officially released versions 5.4.10 and 5.3.20 if the language:

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.4.10 and PHP 5.3.20. These releases fix about 15 bugs. Please note that the PHP 5.3 series will enter an end of life cycle and receive only critical fixes as of March 2013. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.4.

Downloads are available here (source) or here for Windows installations. The Changelog has the full list of bugs fixed these two releases. If you're interested in the migration from PHP 5.3 to 5.4 and are wondering what changes you can expect, check out this migration guide with a list of the new features and changes.

On PHP.net site today, they've announced the latest releases in the PHP 5.3.x and 5.4.x series - PHP 5.3.19 and PHP 5.4.9:

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 5.4.9 and PHP 5.3.19. These releases fix over 15 bugs. All users of PHP are encouraged to upgrade to PHP 5.4.9, or at least 5.3.19. For source downloads of PHP 5.4.9 and PHP 5.3.19 please visit our downloads page, Windows binaries can be found on windows.php.net/download/.

You can view a complete list of changes in this edition's Changelog (including references to both core and extension bugfixes).

In his recent post Gonzalo Ayuso shows how to use Symfony to work with Windows services on the server.

Sometimes I need to stop/start remote Windows services with PHP. It's quite easy to do it with net commnand. This command is a tool for administration of Samba and remote CIFS servers. [...] Today we are going to create a PHP wrapper for [net rpc service].

He uses Behat to create a feature (test) file, the code behind the features and a service class that handles the actual work of interacting with the service (with methods to do things like stop, start and list running services). Examples of its use are also included.

New on the "Do It Yourself!" web development site, there's a post showing you how to setup Composer on Windows to manage the dependencies in your applications.

Composer exists to overcome the problem [with PECL and PEAR being system-wide], composer is a dependencies manager that come in a form of command utilities, composer make it possible to 'plug and play' PHP packages across application no matter what frameworks we are using as long as the packages follow the shared format. With composer we can define our project dependencies simply in a 'composer.json' file, and later on we can install and update these dependencies automatically.

He introduces the Composer tool and then shows how to set it up via the Windows installer (with screenshots). There's two ways to set it up - "Basic" that does the install in one project and "Global" that installs it somewhere outside of the current project, available to all projects.

On the Silver Lining blog (a MSDN Windows Azure related site), there's a recent post showing how you can enable XDebug on your Azure instance to help with debugging your application.

In this post, I'll cover how to run XDebug (including the profiler) in Windows Azure Web Sites. Enabling XDebug in Windows Azure Web Sites is as simple as enabling an extension. However, enabling an extension for the built-in PHP runtime is slightly different than doing so for a custom PHP runtime. I'll cover both scenarios here.

The post is broken up into two sections - one if you're just using the built-in PHP runtime that's already in the instance and another if you're using a custom one of your own. Changes to the configuration files and some screenshots of where to make the updates are included.