PHP on windows
As a developer in both ASP.NET and PHP I’ve spent the last few days trying to install PHP onto IIS.
Today, i declared this task a waste of time. Why? I’m not sure myself really. I would seem that somewhere during the installation of IIS or XP, a certain DLL that PHP requires to load is missing. Trying to track down what exactly is wrong has been a hell of a chore. There is plenty of help out there, but with the combinations of versions of OS, IIS and PHP trying to get a definitive answer seems to be taking a very long time.
So after 2 days of frustration i tried something which at first seems stupid but in fact works quite nicely for my problem. The solution to my problem is to install both Apache and IIS.
I new they both wouldn’t work at the same time, but the question was could they both co-exist without interfering with each other.
The answer seems to be a resounding yes.
Installing XAMP and IIS isn’t a problem, both install quite easily , and to switch between the 2 is just a simple matter of stopping and starting the require server.
In fact this is the solution I really wanted. A nice clean IIS environment to program asp and ASP.NET, and a nice clean Apache environment to program PHP.
Next job is to install SQLSERVER, this should give me complete flexibility when it comes to being able to code for any type of customer.
Once i get a new machine and a wifi card that can be configure with Linux i do intend to set up a Linux server, until then this is the best solution.
UPDATE
After a few days running my server like this i found that even though this set-up is fine for serving web pages, it appears to have some problem with Visual Studio checking out pages.
This being the case, and the install of IIS and Xamp are pretty standard and fast, I’ve decided to remove and install the servers as required.