Microsoft has been working on bringing PHP developers to the Windows platform for several years. The two driving technologies in this initiative are PHP on IIS and the open source SQL Server Driver for PHP.
Since announcing their cloud-computing platform Azure last year, Microsoft has made it clear they intend to break into the large-scale hosting market as well. While .NET developers still get the bulk of Microsoft’s attention, PHP developers aren’t being ignored.
In addition to supporting Windows Azure, the CTP of SQL Server Driver for PHP 1.1 offers the following features.
- Support for PHP version 5.3
- Support for UTF-8
- Support for Scrollable results, row countMigration to SQL Server 2008 Native Client framework that provides for performance enhancements.