In the latest post to his blog Brian Swan hows how to interface PHP with "Dallas", a newly introduced technology from Microsoft that lets developers and users of the Azure platform share data with REST-based APIs.

Given that MIX10 is happening this week and that Microsoft Codename "Dallas" (CTP2) was just released, I thought it would be appropriate to look at how to consume "Dallas" data with PHP. [...] In this post I'll build a simple web page that displays some of the free "Dallas" data. And, I must say, I was really surprised at how simple and easy this entire process was.

The system shares out data sets (a list is here) including things like feeds from the Associated Press, InfoUSA, NASA, NAVTEQ and quite a few others. Brian includes screenshots on how to sign up for a data feed, some PHP that can be used to connect to it (just a REST request) and a simple web page that can output the results.

Pablo Viquez has put together something that all of the Windows-based Zend Framework developers might find very useful during their next offline (or online, really) development session - a Windows Help file version of the Zend Framework manual.

As you might now, you can view and download the Zend Framework reference manual from the Zend Framework site and download it from the download section, however what I wanted was the Windows compiled version of it (CHM file). In order to get this version you need to compile the documentation, after running into some small issues, I manage to do it, and to save you some work.

He only had to fix an issue with one XML file to correct some escaping in the Zend_Feed_Writer.xml and zend.feed.writer.html files. You can download both the English CHM and the Spanish CHM files depending on your needs.

Don Raman has a new post to his IIS blog today with a quick bit of information that Joomla users could use to get better performance with WinCache, integrated directly into the CMS's caching system.

Now that we have WINCACHE 1.1 Beta released which has got implementation for both user and session cache, one can easily take advantage of WINCACHE user cache and increase performance of Joomla. In this post I am going to tell you steps to use WINCACHE user cache with Joomla.

There's a class you'll need to copy and paste to create a new Joomla caching component, but after that it's as easy as having the WinCache tool installed and changing your configuration options to use the new wincache connector class for the CMS's caching.

Here's a direct link to grab this latest version of WinCache since it only works with version 1.1.0 and higher - WinCache.zip.

If you've been using the Zend Framework on a Windows platform (running IIS as the web server) and have been getting some 500 errors and have been left lacking the detail you need on the problem, you should read this new post from Rob Allen about an IIS setting that can help you out.

One of the dangers of frameworks in general is that you forget that they do lots of handy things for you. [...] The error handler in ZF will catch any exceptions and route them to the error action in the error controller. This then sets the correct HTTP response code, logs the error and optionally displays it if a config setting is set.

IIS shows you some default error pages when something goes wrong, but sometimes you might need a bit more information. Rob points you to the "Edit Error Pages Settings" panel in the IIS setup and which setting to change it to for development versus production environments.

On his TellingMachine.com blog today Klaus Graefensteiner has a few things you should consider when selecting the right PHP version for your Windows+IIS server.

Questions he suggests will get you started down the right path are things like:

• What version of PHP do I need?
• What CPU architecture is my computer running?
• What http web server is PHP running under?
• What VisualC/C++ Runtime Libraries are the PHP binaries linked against?

If you're looking to run PHP 5.2+ on Windows, you have two main choices - the VC9 version or the VC6 version.

Following up on his article about getting SQL Azure working with PHP on Azure, Brian Swan has posted a new article in the series, a look at getting PHP itself running on an Azure platform.

In my last post I described how to access SQL Azure from PHP, but I described how to do this when PHP was running on my local server. In other words, I only described how to leverage half the cloud. In this post, I'll leverage the other half of the cloud by describing how to run PHP in Windows Azure.

You'll already need to have a Windows Azure subscription and a copy of the Azure SDK before getting started. With these in hand you can get started building the two packages you'll need to push to the Azure instance - one with the PHP binaries and the other a service definition file. He walks you through creating the application (screenshots), making the definition file and building the package to deploy. If all goes well, clicking on the "Deploy" button in your hosted service control panel should get you all set up.

A few version back the Zend Framework introduced a handy component that can help you get a Zend Framework started quickly - Zend_Tool (and the command line "zf"). It works like a charm on unix-based systems, but has some quirks about it on Windows. To help with the situation, Cal Evans has posted a guide on Zend_Tool and how he got it working on his Windows 7 platform.

One of the cool things about Zend Framework is it's cli tool, Zend_Tool. (zf) When zf works, it's awesome. However, when it breaks, it's a real pain in the butt. [...] Even though it's made great strides, setting up zf is still not seamless. To that end, here is my list of steps needed to setup zf.

He's using XAMPP on a Windows 7 machine and has a list of eight steps you'll need to follow to get Zend_Tool playing happily including locating certain directories (your general path, the path to your php.exe) and a few commands to tell the Zend Framework where to correctly deposit its files. If all goes well, you'll get this kind of result (screenshot). He mentions a slight problem, though - defining your own providers and them not being recognized. It can be corrected, though, using this handy tip.

Brian Swan has continued his series on linking PHP and Azure (as well as SQL Server) with a new article looking at making a sample PHP script work on the platform and connecting it to a SQL Azure Server.

I'll walk you through building a very simple Web page in the same way I did in a recent post: Getting Started with the SQL Server Driver for PHP. [...] There are some differences and limitations, which I'll highlight, but not many that I encountered.

Included in the post are a few screenshots showing you how to create the Azure SQL server, using PHP to create tables in the database and, finally, running the actual script that inserts the personal information (last name, first name, email) into the table and pulling it back out again to check the results of the insert.

According to this article in The Register, more PHP developers (of the ones polled by Zend) prefer to do their actual development on a Windows platform, but still host their sites on something like Linux (as shown in the results of a Zend survey).

In a recent study from Zend Technologies, forty two per cent of PHP programmers named Windows as their primary development operating system. Linux came second, with 38.5 per cent, while Mac's OS X was third on 19.1 per cent. Zend did not say how many developers it spoke to, but called the December poll a "global survey" ranging from independent consultants to organizations with more than 5,000 employees.

The same survey shows that the choice of Linux for the server is still strong, and that the rest of the options (Windows, OS X) are trailing by a large percentage. You can read Zend's official press release on the survey on PRWeb.net.

Continuing in his SQL Server driver series, Brian Swan has a new post to his MSDN blog about handling authentication with the integrated Windows support that makes connecting to a server simpler.

I must confess that when I first tried using Windows authentication with the driver, I was puzzled. I was logged in to my computer as Microsoftbrian.swan, and I know that is a valid login for my database server. [...] he syntax for using Windows Authentication with the driver was easy, but understanding what identity was being used in the connection attempt was confusing.

He finally figured it out, though - the identity of the user on the connection would always be the user the web server was running as. With this knowledge, he was then able to look into other options that he could use to fine tune the connection with the FastCGI component and its impersonation abilities.