Brian Swan's Blog

Following on the heels of announcements a couple of weeks ago, the Interoperability Team at Microsoft is announcing the availability of another update to the Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse. In this post, I’ll use the updated Eclipse plug-i to walk you through creating and running a project in the Windows Azure Development Fabric, readying a project for deployment to Windows Azure, and deploying a project to Windows Azure. (This post assumes you have a Windows Azure account and have set up a storage service and SQL Azure. If you haven’t, these posts have directions for doing so: How to Run PHP in Windows Azure and Getting Started with PHP and SQL Azure.)

This week saw a couple of announcements, lots of great community-written content, and even a few opinions. Feel free to add yours…

This morning I came across this article on PHPDeveloper.org: Blast from the Past – One Year Ago in PHP. That brief look into the past got me to thinking about what Microsoft has done lately toward PHP interoperability. (By “lately”, I mean in the last few years.) And, I’ve been working on a presentation for TechEd in Berlin next month that will, in part, provide a brief overview of Microsoft’s efforts toward PHP interoperability and support. So, I thought I’d share a bit of that summary here…

Welcome October! (How’d October arrive so quickly?) The start of this month sees some great community-produced content (especially see the Programming Language Tradeoffs post), some important PHP/IIS announcements and releases, an in-depth look at developing applications for the cloud on the Windows Azure platform, and lots more…

Yesterday, Ruslan Yakushev announced the availability of the final, stable release of the PHP Manager for IIS (v1.0).  (It is available for download here.) There have been some significant changes in the final release since I wrote about the first beta release a month ago. Not only have several bugs have been fixed, but new functionality has been added. Now the PHP Manager can help you validate and optimize your PHP installations on IIS. This is in addition to the functionality that was available in the beta releases:

This week, there was lots of news about the release of Windows Azure Companion and updates to other Azure-related SDKs for PHP. And, an important announcement about an ASP.NET vulnerability that could affect PHP sites running on IIS…and other stuff…

I wrote a post a while back about getting started with SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) and PHP that has generated lots of questions (both in the comments and in e-mail and conversations I’ve had since then). One of the most common questions has been “How do I render a report as an Excel document?” I’ve been telling folks that this is easy with the SSRS SDK for PHP (and it is easy), but when I sat down to do it, I ran into a problem. So, in this post, I’ll show you how to render a SSRS report as an Excel document and how to avoid the one problem that caused me headaches. I will assume you have read my previous post about getting started with SSRS and PHP.

This past weekend Vijay Rajagopalan of the Interoperability Team at Microsoft delivered the keynote at OSI Days. As part of his presentation, he announced the release of four projects that may be of interest to PHP developers: