On the Microsoft adCenter website, Walter Poupore has made a few posts to his blog about integrating PHP with various parts of the adCenter technology. Topics include:

• How to Check the Status of an Ad Group in PHP (V5)
• How to Create Keywords in PHP (V5)
• How to Create Ads in PHP (V5)
• How to Create Ad Groups in PHP (V5)

Check out his blog listing for more.

On the Developer Tutorials site, there's an article talking about the integration that can be made with PHP6 and .NET Visual Studio:

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.

In a new blog entry, Michael Kimsal points out a driver that Microsoft has released (during the end of last year) that allows PHP5 applications to connect directly to a SQL Server database.

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).

Tony Bibbs, in the wake of last week's surprise from Microsoft to Yahoo, has posted a few of his thoughts on the matter.

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.