The Official Microsoft IIS Site

Lots of new software for IIS, ASP.NET, AJAX and PHP this week

bills — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:13:00 GMT

Wow, what a week of innovation for the Microsoft Web Platform. This week we released a ton of new software which, if you haven’t already, you’ve got to check out. Here is a quick overview:

IIS Search Engine Optimization v1 final release!

The IIS team shipped the final release of IIS SEO toolkit which makes it easier to optimize your Website for search engines. It acts like a mini-search engine on your computer, scans your site and then provides useful tips for how to improve the relevance of your site to search engines. This tool is now out of beta and available for download through Web PI.

ASP.NET MVC 2 beta!

The ASP.NET team has been hard at work on the second release of MVC, which is now available to beta test. Phil has a great blog post on the release with links to the download page, readme notes and the source code. There are a bunch of new features in MVC 2 including AsyncController, expression based helpers, improvements with client validation, all new areas support, and more. Read more on Phil’s blog.

ASP.NET AJAX Library beta!

The ASP.NET AJAX team also has some exciting news with the release of the ASP.NET AJAX Library beta. James has a terrific blog post with the news This is the first project accepted into the new CodePlex Foundation! (more on that later) The ASP.NET AJAX Library has a new portal at www.asp.net/ajaxlibrary with tutorials, samples, and more. Read James’ post about the news and check it out!

IIS Application Request Router 2 final release!

The IIS team also released the final version of the IIS Application Request Router v2. This is a super powerful module that provides routing and load balancing capabilities for Windows and IIS. It makes it easy to create and manage an entire cluster of Web servers. Mai-lan has a lot of info on the release in her blog post and you can download ARR v2 using Web PI today.

PHP WinCache module final release - faster PHP on Windows!

The PHP team announced today the final release of the Windows Cache Extension for PHP, or WinCache for short, which makes PHP run much, much faster on Windows. The iBuildings guys released a benchmark showing how the WinCache extension speeds up PHP by as much as 2x over standard PHP. The other exciting part of this announcement is that the sources for the extension are now available under an open source BSD license and the source code is maintained and host on http://pecl.php.net/packages/wincache/ If you install PHP using Web PI, you automatically get WinCache.

Windows Cache Extension 1.0 for PHP Released

Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : PHP — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:40:00 GMT

The Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) team announced today the release of Windows Cache Extension 1.0 for PHP , a PHP accelerator that is used to increase the speed of PHP applications running on Windows and Windows Server. This is a production-ready release that is provided under an open source BSD license , with the source code hosted and maintained here , and the documentation hosted on php.net . You can find more details on this release on IIS team Product Unit Manager Mai-lan Tomsen...(read more)

Final RTW version of WINCACHE 1.0 released

don.raman — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:19:39 GMT

I am extremely proud to announce that we have released the final RTW version of WINCACHE 1.0. Please look at the forum announcement of the same at http://forums.iis.net/p/1162808/1925444.aspx#1925444 which contains all the details about the release. I would strongly recommend everyone running Beta/RC version of WINCACHE 1.0 to upgrade to the final RTW release. If you installed WINCACHE 1.0 RC from Microsoft Web Platform Installer, you can use the same to upgrade to RTW. Upgrade from RC to RTW is supported through WPI. If you have installed WINCACHE 1.0 RC/Beta manually, you will need to install the new binaries manually. Here are the steps:

Download appropriate bits from http://windows.php.net/downloads/pecl/wincache/

If you are running PHP 5.2.* you will need to download 'wincache52.exe'
If you are running PHP 5.3.* you will need to download 'wincache53.exe'

Run the executable from the saved location. If you are on Vista+ OS, I would advise you to run the executable as an administrator. Right click on the executable and click 'Run as administrator' button as shown below:

If you are prompted with UAC dialog, click 'Yes' to proceed.
Accept the license agreement.
Extract the files to choice of your location.
The folder will contain 4 files as shown below:

If your server is running, please stop it before you continue copying files.
Replace the old 'php_wincache.dll' with the new one.
Replace the old 'wincache.php' with the new one.
Start the server.

There are some good enhancements in this release. The 'wincache.php' file has been enhanced to support:

A brand new chart showing the state of cache memory consumption
Supports all different kind of IIS authentication
List of files displayed now in sorted order

There has been many critical bug fixes in the DLL itself. There were people who reported crashes and that to random crashes in WINCACHE DLL. All these crashes were happening because of the scavenging logic. WINCACHE on every request checks if there are stale files which need to be removed. There has been nasty bugs in this code path which has been fixed. If you are seeing WINCACHE crashing in event viewer or otherwise, most likely cause was scavenger not working properly. We believe the final RTW release will have all these issues fixed.

We have also addressed a situation where WINCACHE was making PHP bail out. This was happening because exception were not being handled properly from the extension. A detailed release notes can be found here.

WINCACHE is now also an open source from this release under BSD license. Extension source code can be found at http://pecl.php.net/package/WinCache. All the documentation about WINCACHE can be found at http://us3.php.net/wincache/. If you are having problem running WINCACHE please visit our forum at http://forums.iis.net/1164.aspx. If you have found a bug, you can report it at http://pecl.php.net/bugs/report.php?package=WinCache. We will be more than glad to help you.

In case you are interested in some performance benchmark regarding how WINCACHE competes with some of other available caching solution on Windows, here are the links (They are all published by our users/customers):

It has been a lot of hard work and sweat in the past 6-7 months when we started this project and now that we are done with version 1.0. I hope you all will like this. I would personally like to thank all of you for helping across different milestones in finding bugs, requesting feature enhancement and doing all little things which matter to us.

And yes, there is a future for WINCACHE and we are going to start working on V2 soon. We are totally committed here to make PHP work the best on IIS. So do drop all your ideas/suggestion and we would love to incorporate those in early stages.

Hopefully this release will help you running PHP on IIS faster. Thanks for patient reading and good bye.

Don.

Windows Cache Extension for PHP (aka, “WinCache”) 1.0 General Availability Today

mailant — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 21:21:59 GMT

Today we announce the general availability of the Windows Cache Extension for PHP 1.0 (affectionately known as “WinCache”), which is an open source built-for-Windows caching extension to the PHP engine. You can view, contribute and download the source code for WinCache at the PHP repository for extensions (http://pecl.php.net/package/WinCache), where we have joined other Linux-based PHP caches.

I wanted to thank Pierre Joye for his invaluable help in helping connect the IIS product team with PECL, and for agreeing to host the WinCache binaries on http://windows.php.net.

We cordially invite the PHP development community to join us in development of this caching extension for PHP on Windows. We already have gotten one contribution from the community in our pre-release mode and are very excited to have others join this new PHP on Windows caching community. The IIS team at Microsoft is going to start off the v2.0 development by adding a user cache and lazy class loading to the opcode cache, file cache, and relative file cache that is available today in WinCache 1.0.

I am proud of the WinCache project for many reasons, including:

WinCache solves a real customer problem. WinCache provides a Windows PHP caching extension that is free and part of the PECL extension library, and can accelerate the performance of all PHP applications on Windows.
WinCache is our first big open source contribution to the PHP on Windows community. The IIS team has made several code contributions (big fixes) to the PHP 5.3 release, as well as provided support for the Windows Installer for PHP community (John Mertic rocks) and the Windows documentation on the PHP website. This WinCache release is a substantial amount of code that we are open sourcing on the PECL extension library. We hope others join this new community to help accelerate PHP performance on Windows.
WinCache represents a series of “firsts” for Microsoft…first time Microsoft has contributed to the PECL repository, first Windows-based PHP cache, first joint community project between Microsoft and the PHP development community, first BSD license for the IIS team….and the list goes on. The WinCache feature team of Ruslan, Kanwal and Don are incredibly passionate about PHP on Windows, respond to their blog and forum comments, and lurk on the PHP on Windows mailing list if you want to connect with them.

Here’s some more information about WinCache.

What is WinCache?

WinCache is actually a collection of three caches:

An opcode file cache, just like the one that APC provides to cache compiled PHP code
A file cache to help when your PHP scripts run on remote servers. This is net new functionality that is not available in other caching modules at the time of this blog.
A relative file cache to cache relative file paths for when you are running PHP scripts on remote servers.

WinCache itself was designed, written, and tested by the IIS engineering team that also brings you FastCGI, the core PHP hosting platform in IIS. We are planning to add more caches to WinCache in 2010.

What is the WinCache license?

WinCache is licensed under BSD.

How do I get WinCache?

You can compile WinCache as part of your PHP compilation from the PECL library.

If you download any PHP application from Web Platform Installer and/or the Windows Web Application Gallery (WordPress, Moodle, SilverStripe, SugarCRM, Acquia Drupal, Gallery 2, and any other new PHP app in the Web App Gallery), you will automatically get WinCache installed on your IIS computer as part of the PHP application install. We want to make sure that your PHP application deployment and hosting experience is great on Windows.

How do I learn more about WinCache?

You can learn more about WinCache’s features and how to get started on the http://php.iis.net community site. You can also check out the blogs for the feature team (Kanwal, Ruslan, Don) or visit the community forum which is supported by the feature team and WinCache community.

How much faster is it to run WinCache with my PHP application?

We are seeing quite a significant increase in performance. But don’t take our word for it. Check out the perspective of other members of the PHP developer community:

Cal Evans’ benchmark results
TechPortal at iBuildings.com benchmark results

We hope that others try WinCache and publish their findings as well.

Why is Microsoft investing in making PHP run faster?

IIS is all about making apps run at their finest on IIS. We have a built-in advantage with ASP.NET apps because we can walk down the hallway in our building here in the Seattle area to talk to the ASP.NET team about how to make the ASP.NET on IIS experience better. But we also care deeply about the PHP experience on IIS – there are some amazing applications like WordPress and Drupal that form the foundation of many a Web site on the Internet. We are committed to making those applications run great on Windows, which is the primary motivation for our WinCache project.

How do I learn more about WinCache?

To learn more about WinCache, you can check out:

The PECL documentation on WinCache
The PHP on Windows feature team (Kanwal, Ruslan, and Don) blogs
The WinCache community forum
The IIS.NET documentation on WinCache
The source code of WinCache on PECL, licensed under BSD
How to file bugs on WinCache in PECL

Thanks,

Mai-lan

WinCache Extension 1.0 for PHP – Release to Web

RuslanY Blog — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:01:05 GMT

The Windows Cache Extension 1.0 for PHP – RTW is available for download. This is a final, production-ready release that is provided under an open source BSD license with the source code hosted and maintained on http://pecl.php.net/packages/wincache/ . Install the Windows Cache Extension 1.0 for PHP – RTW To install the Windows Cache Extension for PHP 5.2 and PHP 5.3, use the download links at the extension’s home page at http://www.iis.net/expand/WinCacheForPhp . The installation...(read more)

IIS Documentation Updates on PHP.NET

RuslanY Blog — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:18:44 GMT

PHP.NET web site is known for its well written and very detailed documentation. The excellent content together with tons of user contributed notes has made the PHP.NET the primary place for getting the help on all PHP related questions. However there was one thing in the PHP docs that was still not up-to-date. The Windows and IIS-specific installation and configuration sections did not cover the latest changes in Windows, such as IIS 7 and FastCGI. Now I am glad to let everyone know that this part...(read more)

Enabling WINCACHE on per site basis

don.raman — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 19:33:00 GMT

With WINCACHE 1.0 RC one can configure parts of WINCACHE solution on a per site basis. As you know WINCACHE has two kinds of cache namely output code cache and file cache. With RC release, you have the ability to turn output code cache on a per site basis. We have got a new WINCACHE directive named WINCACHE.OCENABLEDFILTER which can be used to enable/disable output code cache on a per site basis. This INI directive can take a string which is list of comma separated numbers. Each number in the string represents a valid site id which is a unique identity IIS gives to each Web Site when the site gets created. All the site id included as part of this string will actually toggle the value of WINCACHE.ocenabled while running WINCACHE functionality. Example, if you have below in your PHP INI file:

wincache.ocenabled=1

wincache.ocenabledfilter="2,3"

This means for site having id 2 or 3, WINCACHE output code cache will be disabled and for all other site id, it will be enabled. So this is an extremely easy way of turning WINCACHE output code cache on a per site basis. Some users also gave us suggestion that we should have a similar switch for WINCACHE file cache. Yes, we have heard you and a similar INI directive named WINCACHE.FCENABLEDFILTER has been added for the final RTW release of WINCACHE 1.0. This feature will make the enabling/disabling cache feature on a per site basis complete.

Let's talk about how we have implemented this. IIS sets a server variable named INSTANCE_ID which is set to site ID for that Web Site. We check for that in the WINCACHE code using Zend function and toggle the feature appropriately. This is a good feature because this is independent of PHP and can work with both PHP 5.2 as well as PHP 5.3.

By the way, PHP 5.3 also gives you a way to achieve the same thing using PHP_INI_PERDIR concept. Let's say you have two site SITE1 and SITE2 and their respective physical path point to (equivalent to server variable 'DOCUMENT_ROOT') C:\inetpub\wwwroot1 and C:\inetpub\wwwroot2. Here is how you can enable WINCACHE for SITE1 and disable the same for SITE2. In your PHP.INI file include this:

[PATH=C:/inetpub/wwwroot1/]

wincache.fcenabled=1

wincache.ocenabled=1

[PATH=C:/inetpub/wwwroot2/]

wincache.fcenabled=0

wincache.ocenabled=0

The above will do the trick. One thing to note here is that PHP_INI_PERDIR doesn't work properly for PHP 5.3 on XP and Windows 2k3. All the bugs related to this has been fixed and you can get it work using the latest snapshot from here.

Hope this is going to help you. Thanks for the patient reading and good bye.

Don.

Running PHP displays the code itself

don.raman — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 20:31:31 GMT

At times we get posting on the forum where user complain that when they are running a PHP file, the output is the file itself. This means that the script was not recognized as a PHP script and rather it was treated as plain text by the browser. There are two reasons why you can run into this situation to my knowledge.

If you are using short tags for writing PHP script like <? echo 'Hello World' ?>, you should ensure that you have short_open_tag INI directive set to '1' in your PHP INI file. If this is not the case the script will not be treated as PHP script. I would prefer PHP script like <?php echo 'Hello World' ?>. This is more clear and avoids confusion.

Another reason for running into this situation can be if the PHP file is not saved as ASCII/ANSI. Saving the PHP script in UNICODE/Multi-byte format will again fail the script to be recognized as PHP script. Always save the PHP script as plain text file to avoid running into this situation.

Hopefully this will help some of you in getting around this problem. Thanks for patient reading and good bye.

Don

WINCACHE 1.0 RC - New cool features

don.raman — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 05:49:56 GMT

I will be talking about some new features we have coded in WINCACHE RC release. We have introduced new API and changes/additions to the WINCACHE INI directives. I am going to explain two new improvements we have done over Beta release which will dictate how WINCACHE is going to cache the file.

We have exposed a new function wincache_refresh_if_changed(). This API forces WINCACHE to check for the file change for the files mentioned in the parameter next time the file gets loaded. So this effectively means bypassing the wincache.chkinterval value.The parameter takes the below values:
- A simple string which is a way to pass one single file name
- An array of strings where one can specify an array of file names
- NULL meaning every single file

One important thing to note here is that this API just forces WINCACHE to check for a file change on every request of loading the file. This will not remove the file from the cache unless the file has actually changed. So if there are files in your application which changes dynamically or frequently it is probably a good idea to add those in list by using this API. A good example is 'config.php' file in major PHP applications. This is the file which stores all your configuration and is a good candidate to add to the list as you will probably want the changes (like change of password etc) to get reflected immediately rather than waiting for the interval being set by wincache.interval INI directive. The calls to this API is cumulative in nature. This means the successive call adds to the list and doesn't override the original list. Look at below example:
<?php

require_once('inc1.php');
require_once('inc2.php');

wincache_refresh_if_changed('inc1.php');
wincache_refresh_if_changed('inc2.php');
?>
The above code ensures that both files 'inc1.php' as well as 'inc2.php' are added to the list and if anyone gets modified the changes will take place immediately.

And remember this takes priority over whatever value wincache.chkinterval is set to. This will be important when you will know about the next feature.

Another thinking that we debated in our feature team meeting was how often PHP file within your application will change. I believe it will not be very often that you will change your PHP files. So I am introducing to you this cool value of '0' which can be set as part of wincache.chkinterval. This will ensure that file once cached will never be checked for the condition if it has changed or not. And this applies to all the files. Now I believe this with the above feature will make a great combination. You know which files may change (and is small). Probably you will like to add them to refresh list using the above API and set wincache.chkinterval to '0'. Since the above API takes priority it will ensure that files which gets changed will be checked and others will never get checked.

I think these two new features will make a great combination if used in the right way.

I hope you will like these features. Want some feature which is missing, feel free to leave your comment here. I will be so happy to represent your feelings in our feature team meetings. Like these features, well kudos are always welcome. It serves a big motivation for us.

Thanks for the patient reading and good bye.

Regards,

Don

WINCACHE 1.0 RC - Using the statistics page

don.raman — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 05:49:00 GMT

We did the Release Candidate (RC) release of WINCACHE today. For details look here. It is exciting to see this out as this gives more flexibility in running the software in production environment. One of the enhancement we have done in this release is to provide a brand new statistics page on popular demand. Lot of people asked about statistics page in the forum. We worked on a new statistics page which is really full of lot of information and will be very useful. It has got:

Authentication support. Since we are exposing some server statistics on this page we have secured it using basic PHP authentication. For implementation details look here.
If you have GD extension loaded it shows some nice graph regarding cache hit and miss.
Well applied CSS with buttons to support different statistics like file cache, output code cache and relative path cache statistics.

This file is named 'wincache.php' and is never cached. So this means you will get real time statistics about your cache. This file can be found at:

If you have installed WINCACHE through Web Platform Installer

This will be present at 'C:\Program Files\IIS\Windows Cache for PHP' on x86 machine and 'C:\Program Files (x86)\IIS\Windows Cache for PHP' for x64 machine.

If you have installed it manually using the extractor

This will be present in the same folder where you have extracted the binaries.

In order to use this page, you must do the following:

Change the default password. The default password is set to 'wincache'. So please change it to something else.
After you have edited the password, put this somewhere in your WEBROOT folder, I would not put it at WEBROOT folder but rather in some folder under WEBROOT folder whose name is known just to me. Another level of security.
Access the page in the browser using the appropriate address. The browser will popup the authentication dialog. Enter your username and password and you will be able to see the statistics.

I would also suggest that you should change the default user name in the 'wincache.php' file. The default user name is 'wincache'. This will give you additional level of security.

One important note, in order to have this work in php.ini file directive cgi.rfc2616_headers should be set to 0 which is the default value.

I hope you will like the new release. We have worked very hard for this. If you have any suggestion do report it back to us. If you want to report a bug or problem with installation etc. use the WINCACHE forum.

Thanks for patient reading and good bye for now.

Thanks,

Don.

Windows Cache Extension 1.0 for PHP – RC

RuslanY Blog — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 05:45:47 GMT

The Windows Cache Extension 1.0 for PHP – Release Candidate is available for download. The release contains functionality and stability improvements and it is believed to have the quality level suitable for production deployments. Install the Windows Cache Extension 1.0 for PHP – RC To install the Windows Cache Extension for PHP 5.2 and PHP 5.3, use the download links at the extension’s home page at http://www.iis.net/extensions/wincacheforphp . The installation with Web Platform...(read more)

The survey is about to close...

Microsoft SQL Server Driver for PHP Team Blog : PHP — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 23:30:00 GMT

Have you submitted your response to the survey yet? If you have, thank you for taking the time to provide us with your feedback. If you have not yet taken the survey OR have not finished it yet, it's time to get it completed so that your voice can be heard. The survey, which is available here will close on 21st October 2009. Thank you, Raghu Ram Principal Group Program Manager, SQL Connectivity, Microsoft Corp, Redmond, WA...(read more)

Configuring PHP Extension on Windows - A simple way

don.raman — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 01:42:00 GMT

There has been too many problem reported in our forum about not able to configure one particular extension. The problems are many:

Configuring a non-compatible version of the extension
Missing some dependent DLL
Trying to use thread safe version of the extension DLL for non thread safe PHP build and vice-versa

If you have configured a PHP extension and you can't see it loaded, I generally run the command (assuming your PHP is installed at 'C:\Program Files\PHP')

'C:\Program Files\PHP\php-cgi.exe' -v from the command prompt.

This really helps in catching some error.

So what's the best way to configure a PHP extension. I would say if the extension you are trying to install is available as part of PHP MSI, it is the best idea to use the PHP MSI to configure your extension. There is no manual step involved and all right dependent DLL will also get installed. Plus your PHP.INI file gets updated automatically. Now I am going to tell you how to achieve this from a PHP MSI UI. Let me warn you this is for novice user. Expert ones can just skip this. So here are the steps:

Go to Control Panel
Click on Add/Remove Program (Or, Uninstall a program)
Select PHP MSI and click on 'Change'. Remember you should have installed PHP using the PHP MSI. If you have installed it using the ZIP file this won't work.
You will see the below UI.

Click on Next, following UI will appear.

Click 'Change'

Select 'IIS FastCGI'

Chose the extension you want to install and click 'Next'.

Click on 'Change'
Click on 'Finish' on next screen and you are done.

So you now know how easy it is to install a PHP extension using the MSI.

Hopefully this will help you in setting up your PHP extension. Thanks for the patient reading and good bye.

Don.

Simple Authentication Page in PHP

don.raman — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 02:22:00 GMT

As part of WINCACHE statistics page, I came across the need for making the WINCACHE.php file having some kind of authentication. Yes we will have an official WINCACHE statistics page shipping with the Release Candidate due sometime this month. To know more about this upcoming release please read this blog from the Developer on the team. This is the time that I learnt that PHP has built in authentication support. I am going to talk about basic authentication page using PHP. I will be using code snippet from our new WINCACHE.php page to explain how easily this can be achieved.

This functionality is available when PHP is running as an Apache module and not the CGI. So it also works with IIS configured to run PHP using FastCGI. This is how it works:

Use the header() function of PHP to send 'Authentication required' message to the browser.
Browser will pop up a window asking for USERNAME/PASSWORD.
Once the user fills in the USERNAME and PASSWORD the script containing the authentication code is called again.
But this three server variables are set. They are PHP_AUTH_USER, PHP_AUTH_PW and AUTH_TYPE.
So this time your script can do the actual authentication using these server variables.
PHP isset() function comes here handy as you can dictate when to call authentication windows and when to do the actual authentication.

Now let's work on actual code. The code we will work on is very simple. It will simply put a greeting message to users once they are authentication. And here goes the actual code.

<?php
define('USE_AUTHENTICATION', 1);
define('USERNAME', 'wincache');
define('PASSWORD', 'wincache');

if ( USE_AUTHENTICATION == 1 ) {
    if ( !isset($_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'] ) || !isset( $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_PW'] ) ||    
    $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'] != USERNAME || $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_PW'] != PASSWORD ) {
        header( 'WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="WINCACHE Log In!"' );
        header( 'HTTP/1.0 401 Unauthorized' );
        exit;
    }
    else
    {
        echo "Welcome WINCACHE User.";
    }
}
?>

One important note, in order to have this work in php.ini file directive cgi.rfc2616_headers should be set to 0.

That's it and you are done. Hopefully this post will help you writing basic authentication page in PHP. Thanks for patient reading and good bye. PHP also supports digest authentication but that's another blog post.

Don.

Edit: The above works only if your site is configured in IIS to use 'Anonymous authentication'. For a generic PHP authentication solution which will work well on IIS look here.

Upgrading to PHP 5.3 - an easy way

don.raman — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 09:07:08 GMT

I already talked about how WPI can help you installing PHP on Windows running IIS. If you haven't read that post, I would encourage you to read that post before continue reading this. The link is here. So wondering why I am asking you to read the previous post of mine. Well the reason is we are going to upgrade to PHP 5.3 following my previous post and then doing a little bit of trick. Again I have seen a lot of forum posting in the IIS forum where people have asked about this. I would again ensure that manual steps are extremely limited and that most of the process is done by the software.

If you already have any version of PHP running (greater than PHP5.2.8) with IIS FastCGI please ignore this paragraph. Otherwise install the latest version of PHP 5.2.11 using Microsoft Web Platform Installer as described in my previous blog. Once your PHP environment is set properly please follow the next paragraph. A quick and easy way to test the PHP installation is to write a small PHP script (name it anything you want, I am naming it index.php) and have <?php phpinfo() ?> as a content in the file. You can save this file in your WEBROOT folder and access it using browser of your choice.

In order to test PHP installation on IIS I generally do the below:

Go to DOCUMENT_ROOT (typically this will be C:\Inetpub\wwwroot) and create a folder named 'phptest'.
Save the above file with name index.php inside the folder 'phptest'.
Please ensure that you have a site named 'Default Web Site' present and the physical path is pointing to 'C:\Inetpub\wwwroot' and the port binding is default 80 port. When you enable/install IIS by default this is created so unless you have deleted it yourself, it should be there.
Now invoke Internet Explorer and type 'http://localhost/phptest/' in the address bar.
If you are able to see a proper page full with PHP information, you are all set.

If you would like to move to PHP5.3 now I would strongly advise to go through the migration guide at http://us.php.net/migration53. This details out all the differences. new features etc. Windows binaries for PHP5.3 are available at http://windows.php.net/download/. I would advise to do the following:

Understand thoroughly the need for PHP5.3
Go to Control Panel/Add Remove Programs and uninstall PHP5.2.11
Download the MSI for 5.3 from http://windows.php.net/download/. There are certain advantages of using the MSI as it automatically does some configuration setting for you. So I would suggest to use the MSI. Ensure that you are downloading the NTS version of PHP MSI. At a top level MSI will do the below things automatically if you have selected IIS FastCGI to be configured from the install UI:
- Do the handler mapping for *.php files
- Add 'index.php' to default document set
- Set some of the INI directives for you in PHP.INI file which is considered as a good practice
At install time select all the extensions you would like to use.
Install PHP 5.3.
One of the changes in 5.3 is related to timezone where if PHP INI directive date.timezone is not set, PHP will issue you a warning. Please set it to something you would like the default to be to get rid of this warning in your PHP.INI file. A list of supported timezone can be found at http://us3.php.net/manual/en/timezones.php.

Hope this helps you run PHP5.3. And thanks for the patient reading.

Now that you know how to configure and test PHP installation under IIS, let us focus on some cool PHP programming tips. Next week I am planning to talk about writing a basic authentication page using PHP. Till then good bye.

Don Raman