I was going to attend ZendCon this week but unfortunately it fell on Halloween and when you have two little ones that are clamoring to go trick-or-treating, it’s best to stay home. Well, it seems as if I’m missing all the excitement withthe announcement today that we (Microsoft) and Zend have teamed up to deliver FastCGI. FastCGI is billed as a faster and more realiable way to run your PHP applications and it’s all on top of IIS! There is a technical preview available for download today. This release targets Windows Vista, “Longhorn” Server, IIS 6 on Windows Server 2003 and IIS 5.1 on Windows XP.

In addition to the release of FastCGI, Microsoft and Zend are announcing a broader collaboration effort to improve performance and stability of PHP within the Windows platform. Bill Staples explains this more in this blog post as well as detailing what he plans on demoing at today’s ZendCon keynote. This is great news for both the Microsoft and PHP communities.