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Azure Web Sites – WordPress plugin update bug fixed

RuslanY Blog — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 18:02:06 GMT

Windows Azure Web Sites has recently been upgraded to a new version. Among all the improvements and bug fixes in the new version there is one change that fixes a known issue with update of WordPress plugins . There have been numerous questions about this problem at the Azure Web Sites forum . After the service upgrade the Windows Azure Web Sites now uses a newer version of WinCache – 1.3.4 . This version has a fix for for the plugin update problem. I tried it and was able to update all of plugins...(read more)

PHP Troubleshooting in Windows Azure Web Sites

RuslanY Blog — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 19:26:00 GMT

The need to diagnose and troubleshoot application’s failures often comes up during deployment to a hosting environment. Some configuration settings in hosting server may differ from what application expects. Often it is not as easy to figure out the cause of the problem in a hosting environment as it is on a development machine. I found the following techniques useful when troubleshooting errors in PHP applications hosted in Windows Azure Web Sites. 1. phpinfo() This is the most obvious, but very...(read more)

phpMyAdmin on Windows Azure Web Sites

RuslanY Blog — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 17:48:47 GMT

In my previous post about the migration of a WordPress site to Windows Azure I mentioned that I used phpMyAdmin to import existing blog data into a MySql/ClearDb database in Windows Azure. phpMyAdmin is a web based tool for administering MySql databases. It can be used to create tables, edit the data in tables, export/import/backup data and many other tasks. I found it to be an adequate tool for all MySql db administration needs in Windows Azure. This post describes how to install and configure phpMyAdmin...(read more)

Using WebMatrix to Take a PHP Class

robmcm — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 02:01:00 GMT

With the release of WebMatrix 2, I thought that it would be great to take a PHP class and use WebMatrix exclusively for the entire class. Much to my surprise, this proved to be a great experience. Seriously, I did not expect it to go as well as it did. This has nothing to do with WebMatrix, it's just that I've picked up some cynicism over the years where editors are concerned. This pessimistic outlook is largely due to the fact that I've tried a lot of editors based on the recommendations of my fellow geeks, and those have often been bad experiences. Usually they say something like, "Dude, if you're going to write code in <some language> then you have to use the <some editor> application."

Unfortunately, most of these editors fail to live up to their hype, and I am forced to endure trials and tribulations where I loudly exclaim "If I was using <my favorite editor> I would be done by now!" (I periodically accompany those moments with language that is best reserved for a golf course when you've just hit your last Titlelist into the water hazard.)

But those experiences never happened with WebMatrix 2 - not even once; WebMatrix did pretty much everything that I needed it to do, and it did everything really well. As a result, my cynical skepticism quickly gave way to optimistic impression.

I took copious notes about my experiences with WebMatrix throughout the class, and with that in mind, I thought that it would be great to write a blog with my genuinely unbiased thoughts about using WebMatrix exclusively as my PHP authoring platform for the two-month duration of my class. (As a point of trivia, the PHP class that I took was BMIS 410 - Web Enterprise Technologies at Liberty University. Quick shout out to my professor, Michael Hart, who was a great instructor.)

What Went Well

First of all, the intellisense for PHP was quite good - and having the URLs to the PHP.net reference pages in the tooltip help for PHP functions was extremely useful; I spent a lot of time clicking through to the PHP.net website for assistance for one function or other.

Fig. 1 - WebMatrix's Intellisense for PHP.

Using WebMatrix to preview in IE and WP7/iPhone/iPad emulators was great; in my opinion, this experience was much better than the SuperPreview feature of Expression Web.

Fig. 2 - Options for previewing your website.

Fig. 3 - Testing my website in the iPad simulator.

Using the WebMatrix database editor to create tables for my MySQL database was great - in many ways it was much better than using the MySQL Workbench. The biggest drawback in WebMatrix was the inability to create auto-number fields, and I couldn't enter dates in the correct format in the database UI. (That was undoubtedly something that I was doing wrong.) So every once in a while I had to go back to the MySQL Workbench to fix something. That being said, the interface for creating relationships in WebMatrix is great, and much better than using MySQL Workbench.

Fig. 4 - Editing the data in a MySql Database.

FTP publishing is much better in version 2 of WebMatrix. I used an IIS7 web server, so I was able to use FTP7's virtual hosts to publish to a specific site on a shared server. WebMatrix has no FTPS support, so that is something of a loss. (WebMatrix also lacks full WebDAV support, but I've already talked about that in other blogs.)

Fig. 5 - FTP Publish Settings.

This last point might seem trivial, and I realize that a lot of editors have similar features, but the way that WebMatrix keeps track of opening/closing parentheses, brackets, and curly braces saved me more times than I can count.

Fig. 6 - Helping me keep track of what I'm doing.

What Could Have Been Better

Here are the few problems that I encountered with WebMatrix during the course:

This is not a problem that was due to WebMatrix, but everyone once in a while a page would get stuck in the cache and I couldn't see changes that I had made to a page, so I would have to restart IIS Express. I'll have to investigate why that was happening; it could be IIS Express, or it could be the PHP engine - I'm still not sure where the fault lies. Fortunately WebMatrix makes it very easy to restart IIS Express from inside WebMatrix, but still - it was a minor frustration.

WebMatrix only wanted to validate against HTML5, but my class required all assignments to use XHTML 1.0 Transitional DOCTYPE, and that showed up as errors in WebMatrix. Yes - the world is moving to HTML5, but still - that shouldn't cause an error.

Perhaps the biggest feature that WebMatrix lacks is the really cool local and remote side-by-side publishing view that both Expression Web and it's predecessor FrontPage had.

When you have a lot of pages open the WebMatrix tab bar fills up, and it's really difficult to keep track of which pages are open.

It would be nice to tear pages out of the editor like you can do with Internet Explorer and Visual Studio.

I have to mention this last item because it was in my notes, but it's technically not an issue for WebMatrix. One of my personal coding self-annoyances was that I would write the text for a string and then realize that I forgot to put it in quotes; when I would type an opening quote, WebMatrix would try to help me out by adding the closing quote - which would now be outside my string, so I always had to delete one of the quotes. There is an option to turn off that feature; see File->Options->Code in WebMatrix. But that being said, this is a useful feature when I remember to create the quotes before I start typing in a string. So once again, this is really more of a complaint against myself; it's my fault that I sometimes have lousy typing skillz. [sic]

Summary

I should start off by saying that I got an "A" in the course, and I can honestly give WebMatrix some of the credit for that. If I had spent a great deal of time fighting with an editor, I would have had less time to focus on writing PHP code. But in the end, WebMatrix actually made it easier for me to write PHP code.

So in closing, WebMatrix rocks, PHP rocks, and using WebMatrix with PHP definitely rocks.

(Cross-posted from http://blogs.msdn.com/robert_mcmurray/)

RuslanY.net running on Windows Azure Web Sites

RuslanY Blog — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 15:30:36 GMT

I have not been writing any blog posts for a while. That was because for the past two years I have been busy working in a team that develops the Windows Azure Web Sites – a scalable web hosting platform in Windows Azure. Now that the Windows Azure Web Sites (WAWS) is publicly available I decided to try to move my site from private hosting to Windows Azure. My site uses WordPress (with MySql database), PHP 5.3, WinCache object and user cache, URL rewriting and many WordPress plugins. With all...(read more)

Announcing Web Matrix 2

Microsoft Drivers for PHP for SQL Server Team Blog : PHP — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 22:38:00 GMT

Today we are excited to announce the official release of WebMatrix 2! This version includes tons of new features and improvements. In this overview, we will show you how WebMatrix makes it easier to build websites with PHP and publish them. Here is the download page if you want to skip the intro and dive right in. Getting Started Getting started with PHP in WebMatrix is simple and straightforward. There are 3 main options: you can open an existing site, create a new site from the built-in templates...(read more)

Windows Cache 1.3 for PHP 5.4

Robert McMurray's Blog [MSFT] — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 19:37:00 GMT

The IIS team has officially signed off on the Windows Cache Extension (WinCache) version 1.3 for PHP 5.4, and the files have been uploaded to SourceForge . This version addresses all of the problems that were identified with WinCache 1.1 that customers were seeing after they upgraded their systems from PHP 5.3 to PHP 5.4. With that in mind, you can download WinCache 1.3 for for PHP 5.4 from the following URL: http://sourceforge.net/projects/wincache/files/wincache-1.3.4/ You can discuss WinCache...(read more)

Windows Cache 1.3 for PHP 5.4

robmcm — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 19:37:00 GMT

With that in mind, you can download WinCache 1.3 for for PHP 5.4 from the following URL:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/wincache/files/wincache-1.3.4/

You can discuss WinCache 1.1 and WinCache 1.3 in the Windows Cache Extension for PHP forum on Microsoft's IIS.net website.

Source Code Availability

Since WinCache is an open source project, the IIS team has uploaded the pre-release source code for WinCache at the following URL:

http://pecl.php.net/package/WinCache

For the instructions on how to build the extension yourself, please refer to the Building WinCache Extension documentation.

(Cross-posted from http://blogs.msdn.com/robert_mcmurray/)

Microsoft Drivers 3.0.1 for PHP for SQL Server with PHP 5.4 Support Released

Microsoft Drivers for PHP for SQL Server Team Blog : PHP — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 23:04:00 GMT

Dear SQL Server Developer Community, As you know, two weeks ago, we released our 3.0 drivers along with SQL Server 2012 . It was around the same time that PHP 5.4 was also released to the web, and we have received many requests from our community members to support the new PHP runtime. It is my pleasure to announce that we have listened to you, and have updated our drivers to 3.0.1. The major feature added for this release is support for PHP 5.4, as well as some minor bug fixes. As always, you can...(read more)

Microsoft Drivers 3.0 for PHP for SQL Server Released to Web!

Microsoft Drivers for PHP for SQL Server Team Blog : PHP — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 18:48:00 GMT

Dear SQL Server Developer Community, We wanted to extend a massive ‘thank you’ to the community in providing feedback for our release of our Customer Technology Preview back in September, and we’ve been working hard to incorporate the feedback you have provided us. You will find that we’ve fixed many issues you reported, and we are proud to be able to release the final build of our 3.0 drivers. The major highlights of this release include: support for SQL Server 2012 features...(read more)

SAG Awards Drupal Website Moves to Windows Azure

Microsoft Drivers for PHP for SQL Server Team Blog : PHP — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 22:34:38 GMT

This has been re-posted from the Microsoft Interoperability blog . The success of the recent Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards ceremony was buoyed by the move of its Drupal-based website hosted on internal Linux servers to one hosted on Windows Azure . The SAG Awards site is a highly visible, high-traffic website running on Drupal. Hosting it on Azure provides a scalable, public cloud environment for SAG team. They can tune up or down the compute and storage requirements according to expected website...(read more)

Using SQL Azure to Store PHP Session Data

Microsoft Drivers for PHP for SQL Server Team Blog : PHP — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 18:32:57 GMT

This entry is a re-post of Brian Swan 's entry on The Silver Lining blog. In my last post , I looked at the session handling functionality that is built into the Windows Azure SDK for PHP , which uses Azure Tables or Azure Blobs for storing session data. As I wrote that post, I wondered how easy it would be to use SQL Azure to store session data, especially since using a database to store session data is a common and familiar practice when building distributed PHP applications. As I found out, using...(read more)

Command line tools for managing PHP in IIS

RuslanY Blog — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 17:30:46 GMT

The latest release of PHP Manager 1.2 for IIS now includes Windows PowerShell commands that can be used to install, configure and manage PHP on IIS 7 from command line. In addition those commands can be used to automate the configuration and management tasks. Here are examples of what can be done with PHP Manager command line tools: Register a new PHP version: PS C:\Users\Administrator>New-PHPVersion -ScriptProcessor "C:\PHP\536\php-cgi.exe" Get information about current PHP configuration...(read more)

WinCache and WordPress plugin upgrade problem

RuslanY Blog — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 18:47:43 GMT

The WinCache extension 1.1 for PHP has been released last year. Since then several customers reported a bug in the extension that prevents WordPress and other PHP applications from performing automatic upgrades or their plugins. This was reported on WordPress forum as well as on WinCache forum . The new build of WinCache with the fix for this problem is available now at the following location: https://sourceforge.net/projects/wincache/files/development/ The build 1.2.411 is a release candidate build...(read more)

PHP Manager for IIS is available in 5 languages

RuslanY Blog — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 21:00:18 GMT

A new release of PHP Manager for IIS (version 1.1.2) is available for download. This release includes translations into 5 languages: German – the translation is provided by Christian Graefe Dutch – the translation is provided by Harrie Verveer Turkish – the translation is provided by Yusuf Oztürk Japanese – the translation is provided by Kenichi Wakasa Russian – the translation is provided by Ruslan Yakushev Thanks to above mentioned people for providing these high quality...(read more)