PHP 5.3.0 is only in its first alpha release. But, if you run PHP in Microsoft Windows, you should talk a look at the release notes for Windows binaries.

Among the changes are things like the drop of support for Windows versions less than Win2000, the changeover for compiling needs (VC6 versus the newer VC9) and that 64-bit binaries will be provided as well as the normal 32-bit (on a trial basis).

These instructions are intended to cover everything that you need to do to be able to build PHP on a Windows XP system. They may work on other Windows systems, I haven't checked. No prior knowledge is assumed, except how to perform basic operations using the windows command line (eg mkdir, copy) and how to use an editor (eg edit) and no software (other than Windows) is assumed to be installed.

The instructions have been tested with PHP6 and PHP5, the only difference being that any references to ICU can be ignored if you are building PHP5.

The tutorial starts with the download of all needed software - Visual C++, a Windows Server 2003 SDK and the .NET framework. The rest is broken up into three steps:

• getting PHP and the prerequisites to prepare for the build
• customizing the build environment (combining Visual Studio and the SDK)
• performing the actual PHP build (including steps to build resolv.lib and running the compile from the command line).

He also points to Elizabeth Smith's tutorial on compiling on Windows for more information.

For three days I fought with compiling PHP5.2 on windows. The point was to be able to compile PHP-GTK2 a little more often. [...] I'm always up for learning something new and I thought I had enough google skills and entry level knowledge to get things going. Alas, it has all failed.

She recounts the steps she followed in her effort to get the setup working, including setting up the compile environment (no small task thanks to dependencies for Visual C++ Express Edition) and getting down into the PHP. This causes troubles of its own - from command line options not getting passed to external library dependencies - with the ultimate unfortunate result.

All the way to the end and the linker fails AGAIN. What the heck? So I start doing some searching...turned off EVERYTHING and tried to build and ended up with weird iconv and libxml errors - even with disable-all.

nothing works.