Hello PHP Developers,

I am excited to be able to talk to you.  Hello PHP World is an introductory post but I want to make it useful to you.  The first thing you would want to do for getting started oh PHP Development on Windows is to install the Microsoft Web Platform (http://www.microsoft.com/web/downloads/platform.aspx)

Why should you install Web Platform?

It installs getting all the components for developing on the Microsoft Web Platform that traditionally you have to configure separately, in the past.  The Web PI installs Internet Information Services (IIS), the free SQL Express database, the community version of PHP and your favourite PHP Web Apps such as Wordpress, Umbraco etc.,   You can see a complete list of this at http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/

Second, it also provides you the Expression Studio (designer tool from Microsoft.  Read more at www.microsoft.com/expression ) trial version as well as the free Visual Web Developer Express Editions.

How do I start with this

Visit www.microsoft.com/web and explore the different framework, tools, databases and engines that the Web Platform Installer offers.  Click to install the web platform installer and you can customize the items that you want to install as the download and configuration process starts.  I did that over the last week and it took me just 25 minutes to have all these set up (including wordpress etc.,) 

If you already have the IIS installed and just want to start developing with PHP (i.e. if you don’t the apps), you can install PHP from Windows from http://windows.php.net/download/

With IIS 7 we introduced FastCGI that helps rapid performance improvements for handling PHP requests and you would be in for a surprise if you thought IIS was just good for .NET

I will leave it now for you to get started with the Web PI or simply installing PHP for Windows and configuring it with IIS

In the next post, we will start examining how we can take advantage of the tools that we just installed.

Till then, happy programming !

Harish Ranganathan