I’m sitting in the opening keynote session with my fellow evangelist Chris Koenig for the Zend/PHP Conference at the moment where we (Microsoft) just made some exciting announcements around the collaboration efforts between Zend and Microsoft to make Windows the best platform to run PHP applications on.

Last year at ZendCon 2006, Zend and Microsoft announced a collaboration to enhance the performance and reliability of PHP on Windows Server. Through this collaboration the IIS product group delivered a new component for IIS6 and IIS7 called FastCGI Extension that allows IIS to be more effective in hosting PHP applications.

Today at ZendCon 2007, Zend is announcing that they will be redistributing Microsoft’s FastCGI as part of Zend Core, Zend’s certified version of PHP 5. With this, Zend ensures that it’s Windows customers can expect PHP to be as reliable and scalable on top of the Windows platform.

FastCGI is available today with a go-live license for IIS5.1/IIS6.0 and will ship in Windows Server 2008 as a built-in component. With Windows Server 2008 there will be no need to download/install/patch these components. It’s built-in to the underlying server. Reiterating Joe Stagner’s comments, HUGE KUDOS to the IIS team for getting this complete in time for ZendCon 2007! For more details on running PHP on IIS, head on over to the IIS/PHP developer portal.

The announcements don’t stop with FastCGI. Microsoft is also announcing the availability of the first CTP of the SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP. The PHP driver provides an optimized way for developers to leverage SQL Server 2005 for their PHP applications.

To continue the announcement trend today, Microsoft is also announcing a strategic partnership with Zend to provide support for Information Cards to PHP developers through a component built for Zend Framework. This component will allow PHP developers to specify a Web site’s security policy and accept information cards from trusted third parties.

Zend is also producing an implementation of Windows CardSpace authentication mechanism called Zend_Infocard, which will enable web sites to validate CardSpace authentication tokens submitted to the website.

If you are a PHP developer, I would love to hear your thoughts on these announcements. I think this shows that Microsoft is making great strides in providing opportunities to interoperate with technologies outside of the Microsoft realm.

It’s all about choice. Microsoft is giving PHP developers another choice (another tool in their toolbox) to build the best applications they can.