You can either use the IIS7 GUI or add a ASP.NET Web.config file with the relevant tags to your PHP site. In either case you can select different options for the cache, timeouts, change monitoring and expiration policy. With a couple of clicks you can enable your PHP site to get the comprehensive caching features of ASP.NET without a single line of code.

Creating a Membership provider to ADS for use in PHP.	Adding a new connection string to ADS.

Let us take another scenario as well. Consider an enterprise PHP application that is important for your organization. Since your organization has grown since the time it was created, you might want to add or change the authorization and authentication mechanisms in this app. For instance, you might want to use a database or Active Directory to authenticate users and give different users access to different areas of the application based on some roles. Again, if you are running this on the LAMP stack, you will need to code in these changes yourself ? possibly in each page.

In IIS7, performing all of these tasks is simple and can be done without changing even a single line of code in your PHP application. Simply use the ASP.NET Membership and Roles modules as part of the IIS7 pipeline. For this, all you need to do is setup a connection string to the place where your users and roles are stored (database, ADS, etc.), setup a provider to point to these and then create a simple ASP.NET page with a Login control on it. You can also segregate different parts of the site to different users or roles by creating authorization entries through IIS.

The final example is of diagnosing problems in your web site. IIS7 contains a powerful tracing and diagnostics feature again taken from ASP.NET that is now available for PHP as well. You can quickly perform traces on your web site and get detailed diagnostic information regarding performance and failures and use these to troubleshoot your site.

IIS7 comes with more than 40 such features built in. You can also download a whole bunch of more modules (such as ad management, stop hot linking, URL rewriting, media streaming and many many more) from the Internet or write your own using the SDK. Getting access to the extremely rich and powerful feature set of ASP.NET without having to recode your own PHP pages is also a great benefit that clearly puts the advantages of using PHP on Windows 2008 in front.

We'll continue this series with some other explorations ? such as benchmarks of PHP applications running on different platforms as well as a look at the TCO of these cases.