In a rather interesting development, Microsoft announced the other day it would be releasing Visual FoxPro to CodePlex under one of its Shared Source license, although the specific license hasn’t yet been decided upon. This is great news, because although FoxPro isn’t exactly the talk of the town these days, it will give developers an opportunity to look under the covers of a product that has thrived for decades.

At the same time it was announced future development would be halted, although support would continue through 2015.

A few months ago I reported on Microsoft’s attempts to improve PHP’s performance on the Windows platform. A short time later, Zend and Microsoft announced a partnership intended to make this effort official.

The result of this collaboration is coming to fruition, as this week they released the second technical preview release of FastCGI.

Progress in this area is a pretty big deal, because countless PHP developers have historically built their web applications on Windows, only to move them over to Linux due to these longstanding performance and stability issues. Soon these developers will be able to continue using a standardized environment if they so choose.

Learn more about the FastCGI release

Learn how to install FastCGI/PHP

Read Zend’s press release regarding the collaboration

Jason

Upon my return from the Microsoft Web Developers’ Summit a few weeks ago, I penned an article for TechTarget discussing Microsoft’s efforts to ensure PHP runs smoothly on IIS. Today, Reuters is reporting this collaborative effort has been made official, with both sides agreeing to work together towards this goal.

Seattle Times reporter Todd Bishop’s recent conversation with Firefox project co-founder Blake Ross demonstrates Ross possesses a level of maturity well beyond his 21 years. His comments on the future of Firefox, thoughts on Internet Explorer 7, and startup aspirations are fascinating, and well-worth the read.

This interview, coupled with my own experiences using the IE 7 beta over the past few months, has left me wondering what MSFT has really gained as a result of winning the browser wars of the 90’s. It seems to me the answer is really nothing at all, and in fact one could argue its decision to enter the browser market at all was a huge mistake.