The first effort described is the partnership between Microsoft and Zend that resulted in the development of the FastCGI Extension that essentially allowed PHP to be a first-class citizen when used on a Windows Server with IIS. The second effort described is the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP developed internally by the SQL Server team.

They also mention Phlanger and the PHP for Microsoft Ajax projects.

Phalanger is a new PHP implementation introducing the PHP language into the family of compiled .NET languages. [...] Phalanger compiles PHP scripts into MSIL (Microsoft Intermediate Language) which can be executed by .NET or Mono runtime.

He mentions some of the features of the tool (including interoperability between .NET and PHP and the ability to use current PHP libraries inside the .NET application). More information can be found on the Phlanger website.

Joe had an interesting presentation, he kept it short and to the point, and had the majority of his time dedicated to Q&A. Naturally, being in a PHP audience, the questions were about Yahoo, Zend, Microsoft's open source policies.

Obviously, questions were asked about two things - the Zend buyout and whether or not they have stopped talks with Yahoo. The answer to the first was a "no, we're not doing that" and the second was a more vague "we're not done talking to them" sort of answer. Another discussion included Microsoft's contributions to the Zend Core - how they're handled and if they're contributed back.

Zend has laid off approximately 25% of their R&D staff in at attempt to become cash-flow positive and potentially line themselves up for an acquisition. I don't have any hard figures as to what that means but I'd estimate that Zend's recovered somewhere between $6-8M in revenues [...] which is why Everyone I've spoken to who is familiar with the subject considers the lay-offs a positive thing.

He goes through the potential list of buyers that have been mentioned so far (Microsoft, IBM, Yahoo!, Facebook) and gives his "why" or "why not" reasons for the probability for each to make the purchase.

He also comments on the rumor of Andi and Zeev's recent trips up to Seattle...

Israeli startup Zend Technologies has fired 25 percent of its R&D team (at least ten people), as well as others across the company, in an attempt to become cash flow positive, says a source close to the company.

The official Zend word is that yes, there have been layoffs but no, they cannot comment on the reasoning behind them. Several big names are being thrown around for possible buyers - Microsoft, IBM and Oracle - who have all shown interest in the past.

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Check out his blog listing for more.

PHP, .net and Silverlight will be integrated out of the box, along with Visual Studio 2008. The project has long been in the works, but our sources have informed us of an impending announcement that PHP 6 will ship with .net.

The glue between them is a part of the phlanger project.

This isn't replacing freetds any time soon. I guess I'm still wondering what the market for "PHP apps deployed on Windows talking to SQL Server" really is - most of the shared hosting accounts I've seen, even on Windows, offer MySQL or Access as the database.

He also points out a video that was shot of the development team talking about the driver (here's their blog too).

I woke up this morning to the news of a $44 billion buy-out offer from Microsoft for Yahoo!. This is being covered from all angles in various tech sites like Slashdot but I think the one angle I haven't seen yet is what does this mean for PHP?

He mentions the work that Microsoft and Zend have done to push PHP support on the OS (check out this email too) and he wonders what the final impact of it all could mean for the language - will things change drastically if Microsoft becomes a major player in the PHP world or would they stay behind the scenes and give the community the support it might need.

What is FastCGI? I could go on for pages about the technical background, and Microsoft already has some great documentation on the subject, however I'll put it in layman's terms for those who aren't Computer Science majors. [...] CGI is a method that a web server can use for tools like PHP, Perl, or any other language that support it. CGI spawns a new process for each request, which can be really slow. FastCGI speeds this up with a very simple solution â€" instead of creating a brand new process for each request, it creates a "pool" of processes and reuses them.

She talks about her usage of PHP on Windows platforms in her work, about a move her company made from Apache to IIS and how much the FastCGI functionality helped. She also briefly explains how to get IIS and FastCGI to work together to make the PHP functionality happen.