Before I even had the chance to blog about the upcoming Indy TechFest, I come to learn that it is already sold out. Amazing! The Indianapolis technology community is coming together for a great day of learning and networking. They have over 25 sessions across 5 different tracks with industry experts such as Robert Bogue, Chad Campbell, Mark Strawmyer, Paul Hacker and Craig Utley. There will be a number of my Microsoft cronies on hand as well including Larry Clarkin, Tom Pizzato, Bill Steele and Tim Landgrave. Not to mention Josh Holmes of the Code to Live show will be hand with the Code to Live Harley on-hand. The best news of all is it’s free! That doesn’t matter so much now as it’s sold out, but hopefully you had a chance to register before the cutoff.

I am very impressed with the event organizers in their professionalism and drive to make this a top rated event. Chances are, based on the success of this first Indy TechFest, there will be more. It’s great to see the community leaders taking their own personal time to bring great events to their area. It provides an opportunity for the community to learn from some of the industries leading experts. This follows the trend of other highly rated events including devLink and the Heartland Developers Conference.

If you happen to be attending Indy TechFest or in the Indianapolis area on Friday, October 12th, join us at Champps in Keystone Crossing for a little pre-fest party.

I’m sitting in the opening keynote session with my fellow evangelist Chris Koenig for the Zend/PHP Conference at the moment where we (Microsoft) just made some exciting announcements around the collaboration efforts between Zend and Microsoft to make Windows the best platform to run PHP applications on.

Last year at ZendCon 2006, Zend and Microsoft announced a collaboration to enhance the performance and reliability of PHP on Windows Server. Through this collaboration the IIS product group delivered a new component for IIS6 and IIS7 called FastCGI Extension that allows IIS to be more effective in hosting PHP applications.

Today at ZendCon 2007, Zend is announcing that they will be redistributing Microsoft’s FastCGI as part of Zend Core, Zend’s certified version of PHP 5. With this, Zend ensures that it’s Windows customers can expect PHP to be as reliable and scalable on top of the Windows platform.

FastCGI is available today with a go-live license for IIS5.1/IIS6.0 and will ship in Windows Server 2008 as a built-in component. With Windows Server 2008 there will be no need to download/install/patch these components. It’s built-in to the underlying server. Reiterating Joe Stagner’s comments, HUGE KUDOS to the IIS team for getting this complete in time for ZendCon 2007! For more details on running PHP on IIS, head on over to the IIS/PHP developer portal.

The announcements don’t stop with FastCGI. Microsoft is also announcing the availability of the first CTP of the SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP. The PHP driver provides an optimized way for developers to leverage SQL Server 2005 for their PHP applications.

To continue the announcement trend today, Microsoft is also announcing a strategic partnership with Zend to provide support for Information Cards to PHP developers through a component built for Zend Framework. This component will allow PHP developers to specify a Web site’s security policy and accept information cards from trusted third parties.

Zend is also producing an implementation of Windows CardSpace authentication mechanism called Zend_Infocard, which will enable web sites to validate CardSpace authentication tokens submitted to the website.

If you are a PHP developer, I would love to hear your thoughts on these announcements. I think this shows that Microsoft is making great strides in providing opportunities to interoperate with technologies outside of the Microsoft realm.

It’s all about choice. Microsoft is giving PHP developers another choice (another tool in their toolbox) to build the best applications they can.

Today, ScottGu announced on his blog that Microsoft will be releasing the source code to the .NET Framework. The source code is being released through the Microsoft Reference License (Ms-RL). This means the source will be available for reference purposes and to allow for deeper debugging scenarios with your applications.

Intially, we will release the source code for the Base Class libraries, ASP.NET, Windows Forms, ADO.NET, System.XML and WPF around the time we ship Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 later this year. Additional portions of the framework will be released shortly thereafter.

As Whurley states…

Is .NET open source now?  I wouldn’t call it that quite yet.  This is the first step on a much longer journey.  The license indicates that developers can “see” the source code, but Microsoft’s not providing any means of copying it.  If a developer finds a bug in the code, rather than fixing it themselves and submitting a patch to the community they’ll be encouraged to submit feedback via the product feedback center.  They’re showing us the man behind the curtain, but we’re not allowed to speak to him in person just yet.

This, to me, is still an incredible step in the right direction for Microsoft. This will only help developers create the best .NET-based applications they can. This will also help drive an increased and enriching feedback/recommendation engine for the .NET Framework. I just hope the .NET Framework team is prepared to handle it all.

Good luck and great move, team!