Archives
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PHP Manager for IIS 7 Released!
Yesterday, Ruslan Yakushev announced the availability of the final, stable release of the PHP Manager for IIS (v1.0). (It is available for download here.) There have been some significant changes in the final release since I wrote about the first beta release a month ago. Not only have several bugs have been fixed, but new functionality has been added. Now the PHP Manager can help you validate and optimize your PHP installations on IIS. This is in addition to the functionality that was available in the beta releases:
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This Week’s Link List (September 24, 2010)
This week, there was lots of news about the release of Windows Azure Companion and updates to other Azure-related SDKs for PHP. And, an important announcement about an ASP.NET vulnerability that could affect PHP sites running on IIS…and other stuff…
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Rendering SQL Server Reports as Excel Documents with PHP
I wrote a post a while back about getting started with SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) and PHP that has generated lots of questions (both in the comments and in e-mail and conversations I’ve had since then). One of the most common questions has been “How do I render a report as an Excel document?” I’ve been telling folks that this is easy with the SSRS SDK for PHP (and it is easy), but when I sat down to do it, I ran into a problem. So, in this post, I’ll show you how to render a SSRS report as an Excel document and how to avoid the one problem that caused me headaches. I will assume you have read my previous post about getting started with SSRS and PHP.
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Announcing the Windows Azure Companion and More…
This past weekend Vijay Rajagopalan of the Interoperability Team at Microsoft delivered the keynote at OSI Days. As part of his presentation, he announced the release of four projects that may be of interest to PHP developers:
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This Week’s Link List (September 17, 2010)
Clearly, the dog days of summer are past us. This week has seen a significant uptick in community-produced content related to PHP, Microsoft, open source, and more. There is enough here that you might want to allocate some weekend time for reading (or maybe not?)…
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Accessing Windows Azure Table Data as OData via PHP
Did you know that data stored in Windows Azure Table storage can be accessed through an OData feed? Does that question even make sense to you? If you answered no to either of those questions and you are interested in learning more, then read on. In this post I’ll show you how to use the OData SDK for PHP to retrieve, insert, update, and delete data stored in Windows Azure Table storage. If you are new to either Windows Azure Table storage or the OData protocol, I suggest reading either (or both) of these posts (among other things, they will describe what Azure Table storage and OData are, and walk you through set up of Azure Table storage and the OData SDK for PHP):
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SQL Server Driver for PHP Connection Options: Snapshot Isolation
In the post I wrote last week about transaction isolation levels I left out an important option: the snapshot isolation level for database transactions. I’ll cover the snapshot isolation level in this post, and (as in my earlier post) I’ll look at what happens at the database level when using a particular isolation level (rather than concentrating on PHP data access code). I should also point out that in my earlier post I covered the ANSI standard isolation levels, which are implemented by most relational database management systems (SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, DB2, etc.). However, the snapshot isolation level is not an ANSI standard and is not implemented by all database management systems (including MySQL), so this post isn’t necessarily as database-agnostic as my earlier post. That said, the concepts in this post are broadly applicable to many (just not all) RDBMS.
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This Week’s Link List (September 10, 2010)
Here’s the list of interesting links I came across this week…
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Interview with Eli White, PHP Developer and Intern on the ASP.NET Team
I had the good fortune of meeting Eli White, a junior at University of Washington and a PHP developer of 7 years, for the first time at the local Seattle PHP Meet Up a few months ago. I then ran into him recently at Microsoft where I found he is doing an internship on the ASP.NET team. I had lunch with Eli last week and we talked about the work he’s doing on Web Matrix and Razor. I thought his perspective as a PHP developer on Web Matrix and Razor were worth sharing…
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SQL Server Driver for PHP Connection Options: Transaction Isolation Levels
Last week I had the good fortune of presenting at the the Seattle PHP Meet Up on a topic I knew only a little about: transaction isolation levels. It was fun doing the homework to learn more and I’ll share what I learned in this post. However, before diving in, I want to call out two things:
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This Week’s Link List (September 3, 2010)
I missed last week’s list because I was out enjoying the last of our summer weather in in the Pacific northwest, so this week’s list spans two weeks…
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Accessing OData for SQL Azure with AppFabric Access Control and PHP
If you are having trouble making sense of the title of this post, I don’t blame you. To clear things up, here’s what this post is about (which I couldn’t fit any more concisely into a title): The SQL Azure Labs team has made it possible to consume data in SQL Azure as an OData feed. And, you can set up an OData feed so that only authenticated users (authenticated with the AppFabric access control service, or ACS) can access it. In this post, I’ll show you how to consume these protected feeds using PHP.