On DZone.com there's a new post linking to a screencast from Jon Adams about using Lithium, MongoDB and PHP 5.3.1 in IIS (Windows 7).

A screencast demonstrating how to quickly get up and running with PHP 5.3.1 and MongoDB on Windows 7 and IIS 7 and getting started with Lithium, the most RAD framework for PHP 5.3+.

The actual screencast is about a year old, but the topic is interesting enough to bring back up. Lithium has been called the "framework for people who hate frameworks" and focuses on using standardized design patterns in an aspect oriented environment when possible.

Ruslan Yakushev has a new post talking about the latest release of Microsoft's PHP Manager for IIS being available in their Web Platform Installer.

PHP Manager 1.1 for IIS 7 has been released today. This is an incremental release that contains all the functionality available in PHP Manager 1.0 for IIS 7 plus additional features: [...] improved detection logic for existing PHP installations, configuring date.timezone, ability to add new PHP extensions.

You can find out more about the PHP Manager for IIS7 from the CodePlex project for it and can find a complete list of changes in its changelog.

On his PHP Genious blog Timir Shah has written up a new post looking at how you can configure URL rewriting (much like mod_rewrite) in an IIS7 web server running PHP applications.

Few days ago, I faced a URL rewriting problem on windows server. After checking the server configuration, I found that there is an II7 installed. After long research about this, I found that II7 is not support .HTACCESS. If youwant to male your site SEO URL friendly, then you have to use web.config file for URL rewriting instead of .HTACCESS. Now the question is how to make web.config file from .HTACCESS?

He compares the two formats, showing how different directives from the .htaccess file can be translated over. He starts with an example of default documents on either side - the .htaccess defining several "php_value" settings and the web.config setting some default routing and rewrite rules. He shows how to set up a few things on each side - error page redirects and setting up some custom URL rewrite rules for both sides (with examples).

As a part of his work being done on the WinPHP Challenge, Rob Allen has done some work with routing and Microsoft's IIS7 web server.

I've already covered the Sqlsrv adapter, so let's look at rewriting requests with IIS7's URL Rewrite module. As with everything in IIS, you get at this tool via the IIS Manager GUI. Be aware though that the Url Rewrite icon is available at server level and at the website level.

The module allows you to define rules similar to mod_rewrite with Apache and even lets you import them from a current installation. The "Import Rules" panel lets you either specify a configuration file to pull from or lets you cut and paste the rules in for import (as seen here).

Stuart Herbert, prompted by this post from Derick Rethans uses this new post to his blog to point out something that didn't seem to be mentioned and has always been a pet peeve of his when running PHP on IIS - controlling the FastCGI processes so they don't take over the machine.

Running PHP via CGI and FastCGI means that IIS has to do the Windows equivalent of fork()ing off PHP processes to do the actual PHP bit. If your box has too many PHP processes running, the box will start to swap. Once a webserver starts swapping, you've no chance in hell of keeping up with all the incoming requests, and your websites on that particular webserver become unavailable in a matter of moments.

The problem seems to have been corrected in the most recent IIS release, though and correct directions can be found here. Older versions of the web server are out of luck, unfortunately.

Among other things mentioned in his his latest post Bill Staples talks about a new tool that makes the installation of lots of popular web apps (PHP and not) simpler - the Microsoft Web Application Installer.

The Microsoft Web Application Installer (Web AI) is a companion to Web PI, and provides a super easy way to download, install and configure many popular community and open source applications on IIS7. Available applications include DotNetNuke, Drupal, Gallery, Graffiti, osCommerce, PHPBB, and Wordpress, with more on the way.

You can find out more about this web installer and the Microsoft Platform tools from this page on Microsoft's site or in this Web AI forum (where you can also provide your own feedback).

According to the O'Reilly Port 25 blog, there's been a new release of the FastCGI component for Microsoft's IIS web server - FastCGI 6.0 - and how it works with things other than IIS7 and Windows Server 2008.

f you read Sam Raimi's How open source has influenced Windows Server 2008 and Dominic Sartorio's Dominic Sartorio on SpikeSource and Open Source Interoperability blog entries on Microsoft's Port 25 site, you might wonder if FastCGI for PHP only works with Windows Server 2008 and IIS7. Fortunately, that is NOT the case. Head over to http://iis.net/php where you can find and download FastCGI for IIS 6.0 on Windows Server 2003.

He also points out a video tutorial from Microsoft that can help you get this latest version og FasctCGI up and running on your system.

On his blog, Bill has posted about a patch for IIS7 running on a Windows Vista machine that corrects an issue with applications that send multiple response headers.

Today we released a patch for IIS7 in Windows Vista that addresses an issue we've seen with CGI applications (especially PHP applications that use the built-in CGI component). The typical symptom is an application that runs using CGI and is unable to support multiple "cookies" for authentication or personalization.

He also links to the Microsoft Knowledge Base article on the topic and to the download for the patch.

On the "Blond R" blog, there's a first posting that shares some of the knowledge that the author has gained from working to get IIS7 installed with MySQL and PHP 5.

As all of us are talking about the new coming Windows Vista, I decided to dedicate my first post to guide you all on how to setup IIS 7 along with MySQL and PHP 5.

He hadn't found a tutorial that covered getting all three working well together, so decided to create his own - complete with screen shots for each step of the way. First, IIS is set up, then PHP, then, finally, the MySQL installation is completed and all three are tied together. All downloads are linked as well to make it even easier to set your system up.

Andi Gutmans of Zend has posted a new item on his Blogspot blog today concerning one of the announcements that Zend made today in their keynote - the collaboration between Zend and Microsoft to get PHP working even better with Windows.

Today we announced a partnership with Microsoft. The goal of this technical collaboration is to make PHP on Windows a first class citizen. It has always been our goal to make PHP run well on any platform, and this initiative reinforces that. Both companies have also observed huge interest both from the community and our respective customers bases in good PHP support on Windows, and therefore, collaborating on making this happen is a no-brainer for both.

He mentions that it's not the first time that Zend and Microsoft have collaborated, but that this new effort will go far and above the previous effort. He goes on to talk about what the partnership means for both companies and the steps that are being made to get the functionality stable and out to the community.