There have been several teams at Microsoft who have done great things to get “other” technologies to run better on top of the Microsoft Platform. Unfortunately, not many people, especially those outside of the Microsoft community, are aware of the changes taking place to get these technologies to interoperate with Microsoft Platform.

That’s where part of my job, as a Developer Evangelist, is to participate in these technology communities to share the progress of the work we’re making to give developers more opportunities to expand their skill sets and take advantage of a platform that may have not had an opportunity (or reason) in the past. All the while hopefully educating, sharing direction, guidance and a showing off a cool thing or two.

In this particular instance, I had the opportunity to join the Suburban Chicago PHP meetup and discuss some of the work various teams at Microsoft have been contributing to make PHP run better on Windows. Some of the talking points included…

• Increasing PHP performance on Windows by doing simple things like re-compiling the PHP core engine with a modern compiler
• Offering bytecode caching in IIS7 through the Windows Cache Extension for PHP
• Creating an installer with the frameworks, the tools, the server configs and the applications to get up and running quickly
• Having a native SQL Server Driver for PHP
• Developing toolkits, SDKs and sample code to easily take advantage of components in the Microsoft Web Platform including Windows Azure
• Providing guidance on Running PHP applications on IIS
• Including the all-important URL Rewrite Module to give developers control over their URL paths that lead to an SEO happy site
• And providing tools to help you optimize your SEO practices in the SEO Toolkit

It’s great to see the amount of work that has been done in such a short amount of time to make the Microsoft Web Platform the best platform to run your PHP applications on.

As an added bonus (and a promise to the meetup group) here are the slides from my presentation on Make Web Not War…