This year I was honored by being invited to participate as a member of the PHP Community in Microsoft’s Web Developer Summit. I used the opportunity to represent the huge PHP community in Brazil and highlight the community’s work.
Let me give you a glimpse of what the event tries to accomplish and tell you what came out of it in 2009. MSWDS is all about communication. It is a yearly event that allows Microsoft to get in touch with key players in the PHP community and interact with them on various levels. This means they get to ask us questions, and we rant and ask them questions. It is a an effective way of getting Microsoft and PHP to do better business together, which in turn means getting better tools and better performing PHP applications on Microsoft platforms. Both sides get to know more about how the other operates.
Over 3 days Microsoft and the PHP community shared notes, discussed various products and opinions and shared quite a few beers and dinners at the Redmond Commons Campus.
Microsoft has been very active in the PHP area and even though this is often received with skepticism by the overall community their actions are generating a lot of benefits for the PHP community specifically and Windows users in general. You cannot be right all the time, so Microsoft is still making some mistakes, but it is worth looking at some of what they shared with us. The final day of the conference was held under a non-disclosure agreement and is therefore not included here.
One of the highlights of the event was a project led by Garrett Serrack describing the process and plans for making PHP and associated libraries easier to compile from source on Windows – a project that could give Windows a push as a viable platform for PHP, since custom PHP compilations are a big part of PHP sites. Also very interesting were the news of WebPI and IIS. IIS is working on being a centralized dashboard for system developers and administrators and new tools like the SEO toolkit are laying down a new track for innovation. The road ahead for this is still long, but Microsoft got a lot of feedback on the kind of deploy and maintenance oriented services we developers would like to see such as imporvements to WinCache to offer more features and make it share the spotlight with APC.
The WebPI project made life for PHP application users a breeze – its simplicity and the application gallery makes it very simple to install a complete web platform and get a site up and running. The same is not true for developers. Solutions were gathered to address developer needs – amongst these are multiple side-by-side versions of PHP and other applications, automated testing and closed cycle solutions that can contribute back to our applications as well as make our life deploying and testing before releases much easier on this platform.
During our airing of grievances many topics came up which Microsoft really needs to address. The long lead time to new projects and solutions and all the bureaucratic red tape that needs to be cut was the starting point and showed Microsoft they are the ones slowing themselves down. We also highlighted the areas of the world that need more attention from Microsoft evangelists. Recurring topics such as drivers for SQL Server and better developer tools for IE7 and IE8 came up as well.
One matter that generated heated arguments was the Codeplex Foundation. The discussion was triggered by ill-timed and not unplanned comments of an “info-mercial like” nature. Unfortunately Microsoft is still a huge corporation and parts of it still does not understand that the developer community does not want marketing pitches. The message hit home and some sessions reverted from that format, but the Codeplex idea was still not palatable tomost of the people present. The topic was later brought up in a round-table discussion and disagreements were addressed, showing that Microsoft is willing to correct some mistakes.
Some sessions had .NET solutions at their heart and were not very effective in communication, some were interesting enough to generate in us the desire to copy them, but in my opinion these were not really in their right place for the objective of this event. New technologies such as PowerShell, Azure and Silverlight got lots of attention and showed some in the room that these could be much more useful than they thought it could be.
Silverlight triggered further discussion with its use in Bing Maps – the latter is now live with very striking visual effects. Microsoft’s skill for naming projects was criticised many times especially after we figured out that the “ASP.NET Ajax Toolkit” was an ajax library that had nothing to do with ASP.NET. This was dully noted by MS for future naming.
Microsoft also had an opportunity to listen to the main players in the PHP community about the community itself, Ramsey went over some concepts of user groups and I talked about the new organization of user groups in Brazil (simple slides). We also had sessions by Marco and Keith on uncons and community participation, as well as a few sessions on tools and frameworks/closed apps.
One of the sessions explained how we can get in touch with Microsoft and gave us some insight on the internal structure and roles of all Microsoft related posts. This session was great and also opened the floor to questions from both sides.
The end result of the summit was very positive, even though we may only start seeing concrete results in a few months or even a year. The important message i got out of the conference is that Microsoft is working hard on matching Linux as a viable deploy platform and development platform, but more than that they are looking to go one better and innovate. Investing in professionals that develop PHP and its related libraries is also a way that Microsoft can help PHP to be even more viable on Windows. I guess it is becoming more viable and you should give it a try.
I look forward to some of the new tools and features of current products that were showcased in open and closed sessions – I believe Microsoft has a chance of doing great things for the PHP community.
For the team that organised MSWDS all I can say is that you did more then an awesome job: the hotel was great, social events were a great opportunity to get into more detailed talks about the day’s topics. The whole event went down without a glitch – thank you very much for all the hard work.
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