Latest Microsoft Blogs

Wow, what a week of innovation for the Microsoft Web Platform.  This week we released a ton of new software which, if you haven’t already, you’ve got to check out.  Here is a quick overview:   IIS Search Engine Optimization v1 final release! The IIS team shipped the final release of IIS SEO toolkit which makes it easier to optimize your Website for search engines .  It acts like a mini-search engine on your computer, scans your site and then provides useful tips for how to improve the relevance of your site to search engines.  This tool is now out of beta and available for download through Web PI .    ASP.NET MVC 2 beta! The ASP.NET team has been hard at work on the second release of MVC, which is now available...

If you answered “Yes” then it might be interesting to you that there is an opportunity on our team for a person who has passion for making web development easier and exciting for everyone… This job posting is the unofficial job posting  describing a person whom I am looking to refer to my team to consider for an official job posting which exists somewhere on Microsoft.com… :-) Our team is chartered with building Web Developer Tools based on web standards and so we are looking for someone who knows HTML, CSS, JavaScript/AJAX… We would love if this person knows PHP and/or ASP.NET too… If you know someone who loves building Web Sites and is passionate about web development technologies then please pass on the word… The person will most likely...

Microsoft’s strategy with open source has evolved over the past several years as we strive to make Windows the platform of choice for customers.  My team has participated in that process first hand, we’ve worked hard with the PHP community to ensure PHP runs great on Windows , integrated PHP installation into the Microsoft Web Platform Installer , and engaged some of the most popular PHP applications like WordPress , Drupal , and SugarCRM to ensure customers have a great experience running these applications on Windows and IIS.  We’ve also worked closely with the jQuery project to make it a natural part of building applications with ASP.NET.  Today I am happy to be a part of the announcement that Microsoft is sponsoring an open...

Today the Microsoft IIS team has released the beta of the Windows Cache Extension 1.0 for PHP . The Windows Cache Extension for PHP is a PHP accelerator , that is used to increase the speed of PHP applications running on the Windows operating systems...

Overall I’ve been pretty impressed with the reactions to my first round of PHP/Linux/Windows/ASP.NET performance tests. I’d like to comment of the comments   First, while I appreciate the enthusiasm of my .NET friends, the point of my exercise was to give me (and other folks at Microsoft) a starting place to understand some things about the performance of PHP on Windows and of ASP.NET. If your faith in ASP.NET is incrementally sustained by virtue of this data than I’m happy. If I didn’t think that .NET was a as good as or better than any other technology for building web applications then I wouldn’t be working here at Microsoft. But …..  It is incorrect and naïve to use this little bit of data to discount PHP out of hand. I have...

NOTE: This is “Misfit Data” - While I do work for Microsoft, this data is NOT “official Microsoft” data and is not endorsed or ratified by Microsoft in any way. I built and ran these tests because I was personally curious about comparative performance. If these test results cause you dizziness, vomiting, or other undesired side effects, please discontinue use immediately and consult your physician. How does IMPLEMENTATION Performance Compare ? Usually, when someone creates benchmarks, they are trying to prove that their thing is faster than someone else's thing. I’m PAID by Microsoft to write BOTH PHP and ASP.NET Code. I was doing PHP before .NET shipped. I love them both. This makes it hard for me to say anything good about either one....

Though I do allot of PHP development work, I still think ASP.NET is the best option for new web development. Still, it “feels” a bit weird that Microsoft is contributing to these PHP efforts. Did you know that Microsoft is contributing to the PHP Engine ? http://blogs.iis.net/mailant/archive/2009/05/18/contributions-to-the-php-engine.aspx I wonder if we have more 5.3 submissions than Zend yet :) ?   What about WordPress ?  WordPress is a great, great blogging application and probably the most used on the web. We recently submitted code to WordPress to support URL Rewriting on IIS 7 http://ruslany.net/2009/05/iis-7-url-rewrite-module-support-in-wordpress-28/ Weird, but very cool ! Technorati Tags: microsoft , iis , php Read More...

This month the PDF version is FREE ! http://phparch.com/c/magazine/issue/97 There are SEVERAL articles for Developers working on the Microsoft Platform ! Installing PHP on Windows by Hank Janssen and Pierre A. Joye The Windows version of PHP has always lagged behind the other platforms in terms of features and stability, however, the situation has improved drastically during the last six or so months, with PHP on Windows reaching feature parity with other platforms. Developing with PHP on Windows is now easier than ever and, in some cases, has resulted in important PHP innovations. Learn how you can set up a development environment to compile and develop PHP on Windows within minutes. Introduction to Silverlight and the HTML DOM by Joe Stagner...

I like to connect things, I always have. Early in my career as a developer things got build and no one ever considered application integration until after the fact. When I started at Microsoft in 2001 nobody was integrating ASP.NET and PHP applications and it seemed like a natural thing to want to do to me. I prefer ASP.NET for new web development but like many of the existing PHP applications like Drupal. I’ve been doing it ever since and Microsoft’s SQL Driver for PHP makes it much easier to do. Now you can install the latest version with the Microsoft Web Platform Installer Get it here http://www.microsoft.com/Web/downloads/   Technorati Tags: sql , php , microsoft Read More...

As web programmers, we use a lot of strings to move data around the web. Often we’ll use a string to represent a date or an integer or a boolean. Basically "1" in instead of 1, or "April 1, 2009" rather than a proper ISO-8601 formatted culture-invariant date. While these strings are flying around via HTTP it's not a huge deal, but sometimes this loose, even sloppy, use of strings can leak into our own code. We might find ourselves leaving the data times as strings longer and longer, or not even bothering to convert them to their proper type at all. This problem is made worse by the proliferation of JSON, and schema-less/namespace-less XML (that I've often called " angle-bracket delimited files " as they're...