This new article on the IT World website takes a look at the efforts that Microsoft has been making to help PHP "suck less" for the Windows platform.

As you might imagine, [the instability of PHP on Windows] presented a problem for Microsoft, since its own developers knew that a third of Web applications are written in PHP, [Garrett] Serack says. When the company realized that developers weren't using PHP on Windows because really, they couldn't, some inside Microsoft were ready to make a change. Doing so has consumed most of Serack's time ever since.

They talk about some of the steps that Microsoft has taken to help out the PHP project including efforts from the SQL Server team, help on the Windows build process and the contributions they've made back to the PHP project as a whole to make PHP on Windows a better place to be.