Virtualisation is a very hot topic at the moment, and although VMWare are definitely on top of the pile Microsoft's is set to make a challenge with its soon to be released Hyper-V offering which is now in release candidate stage. VMWare have got years of experience on their side, and may even have a more polished product (if you believe all the VMWare blog posts) but Microsoft are set to have a massive advantage, particularly with SMEs, as Hyper-V is a key feature of Windows Server 2008.

Although this article has nothing to do with IIS directly, it does have everything to do with total loss of critical data which is relevant to any content based server such as IIS. On Friday the 29th of Feburary I returned home to the flat I share with my fiancee here in London to find her extremely distressed. She promptly inform me that we had been burgled, and that the low life who performed the act had gotten almost everything of value to us. My head began throbing and I became dizzy as my fiancee unraveled the serires of events that had occurred that night.

For years I've been using the services at dnsreport.com to validate DNS and email configurations. I've not used them in a while and had to recently and found that they have shifted to a pay for use service. While I have no problem with them doing this at all, it does mean that dnsreport.com no longer suits my needs (i.e free to use for ad hoc reports) and I needded to find an alternative.

Got back from holidays today to find an email from Microsoft informing me that I had been awarded my 4th IIS MVP. My thanks goes to Microsoft for the MVP program which is a nice pat on the back for those spending their free time to contribute back to the community. I have quite a few ideas for my site on the boil for the coming year, so hopefully I'll be able to continue to provide content that is relevant and useful to the IIS community. The focus for me of course is and will remain being the intergration of IIS (as well as Windows Server in general) and open source applications.

PHP is technically a platform independent language, however when developing PHP web applications you still need to be aware of the differences in the web server platform you are developing for, and also keep in consideration the possibility for migration between platforms into the future. I found this article some time ago which compares Apache and IIS PHP server array superglobal keys.

Those of you who visit my site from time to time may have noticed that since around September I've been posting around two articles a week. To date I've found this a good balance between my work commitments and various other interests, and am looking at maintaining this same article release schedule into the foreseeable future. This will result in over one hundred articles a year, which is a lot to write about and is something I hope those reading the content of this site can help me out with.

Had an interesting scenario last week where I noticed my site had become a little bit sluggish, and noticed that the download counter for my PHP Installer application was incrementing by around a dozen every time I refreshed the page. I checked my network traffic statistics and I found that something or someone was hitting my site hard. The first thing that went through my mind was I was being hit with a denial of service attack. Was I though?

Since the release of PHP 5.2.1 back in Feburary there has been two new binary packages available for Windows, the non thread safe PHP binaries and the non thread safe PECL binaries. Since then I've read many threads in Internet forums where there seems to be a bit of confusion on what these extra binaries are, how they are used, and what effect they have. In this article I'll discuss the pro's and con's of these new binaries.