Zend is announcing today that they are joining up, and are offering as prizes to the 3 winners a one year subscription to Zend Server, and licenses for Zend Studio. The winners will be announced at the Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam.

This year's challenge has already started, so the registration is closed but you can keep up with the (six) contestants on this page of the DPC wiki.

Generally, folks choose to deploy web-based applications on Windows Server because they already have Windows Server. Selling them something that will only work on Linux is a tough sell, so a competition like this that seeks to show off how well PHP works on Windows should be another small step forward for all those small ISVs like Box UK who want to sell products written in PHP - provided Microsoft actually do something marketing-wise with the results.

His idea is to build a PHP/.NET tool that can act as a web services gateway. He's already started development and blogs about getting the environment all set up - Windows Server 2008, IIS7 and PHP 5.2.9 For Windows.

He's made another post with an update on his status - finishing out the development environment with PHP up and running, setting up a database, picking an IDE (Visual Studio) and setting up a version control system (git).

In this post he takes about what he's trying to achieve with his application and some use case examples and in this other post some of the feedback he's gotten about his dev environment.

We love giving stuff away to developers. So we are really happy to be able to announce that our friends at DPC09, Microsoft, and Leaseweb have come together with us to sponsor the first ever European WinPHP Challenge. We want you to build your next Open Source project on IIS7/PHP and win prizes.

The winner of the challenge will be the one that best takes an application (a new one, not a port of a current project) and creates it on a Windows/IIS platform. Entries will be judges on originality, completeness, use of Windows features and documentation. Registration starts April 2nd and the actual contest will start on April 15th. You'll have about a month and a half (until May 31st) to get your application in tip top shape and ready to be judged.

Keep an eye on the wiki and the techPortal for more details as the start of the contest gets closer. Oh, and since its the "European WinPHP Challenge", only PHP programmers in Europe and the UK are eligible.