Brian Swan's Blog

With the recent production-ready release of the MS Drivers for SQL Server for PHP, the team is now completely focused on building the next version. To do that, they really need your input. The team would really appreciate your taking 10 minutes to fill out a survey here: http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/WEB22AWD66CGAM, but time is running out. The survey closes at 5:00 pm today (Seattle time)! The information the team collects will help them determine and prioritize what features are important to the PHP community in the next release of these drivers.

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time recently trying to wrap my head around the access control functionality in the Windows Azure platform AppFabric, so you’ll find a couple of related links in this week’s list. You’ll also find several cloud-related announcements, mostly about new content that is available for developers, but also an announcement about getting one month of Windows Azure for free. All that said, I found this first link to be most interesting…

The SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) team announced today the availability of the migration assistant for MySQL! (Yes, it supports SQL Server Express.) You can…

Today, the SQL Server Driver for PHP team released the production-ready 2.0 versions of the SQLSRV and PDO_SQLSRV drivers for SQL Server. You can…

I recently found out that I was chosen to be on the judging panel for the My App is Better Challenge. I must say I’m honored and excited, but I also feel somewhat intimidated. Just look at the rest of the judging panel:

One of the interesting incubation projects that the SQL Azure team is working on is the SQL Azure OData Service. If that sentence makes no sense to you, then start by reading this short overview on the SQL Azure team blog: Introduction to Open Data Protocol and SQL Azure. I’ll paraphrase what I read in that post to inspire this post:

Wow! This has been a busy week…especially when it comes to news about Windows Azure and SQL Azure. If you are wondering what Windows Azure and SQL Azure have to do with PHP, just follow the first link, which will take you to a comprehensive article by Maarten Balliauw about hosting PHP applications in Windows Azure. Not all this weeks news is about Azure, however. Some interesting conversations on Twitter led me to some interesting pages about open source licenses. And there’s more…including an article about generating Word documents with PHP…