A little while back the WinPHP Challenge was announced - a contest to get developers working with PHP on Windows and, for the winners, some pretty cool prizes (including a full pass to the MIX10 conference). Rob Allen has decided to put in his entry and talks about it a bit on his blog.

For some insane reason, I decided to enter the WinPHP Challenge and having been accepted, I now need to actually write an app! It's not like I'm not already way too busy or anything... The main reason that I decided to do the competition was so that I could learn about running PHP on IIS, particularly learning the .htacess equivalents. Also getting more familiarity with SQL Server is useful.

He talks about both the server (provided as a part of the contest) and his two application ideas - a modified example from his "Zend Framework in Action" book or a SQL Server inspector/administration tool similar to a phpMyAdmin.

He's also documenting his progress in installing Windows Server 2008, getting PHP up and running and finalizing the installation.

He's also named his application - SuccessSQL - and looks at viewing PHP errors over the network and working with MSSQL and PHP.