I had the opportunity to present a talk at one of the local PHP meetup groups in Chicago. The title of this particular talk is – Make Web Not War. This is a slogan that the Microsoft Web Platform team has adopted as a kind of statement to show how we feel about the so-called technology religous wars (“my software/language/technology is better than yours”). It’s not about the language, the framework or the tools. It’s about the Platform and what that platform can provide to solve your needs.

There have been several teams at Microsoft who have done great things to get “other” technologies to run better on top of the Microsoft Platform. Unfortunately, not many people, especially those outside of the Microsoft community, are aware of the changes taking place to get these technologies to interoperate with Microsoft Platform.

That’s where part of my job, as a Developer Evangelist, is to participate in these technology communities to share the progress of the work we’re making to give developers more opportunities to expand their skill sets and take advantage of a platform that may have not had an opportunity (or reason) in the past. All the while hopefully educating, sharing direction, guidance and a showing off a cool thing or two.

In this particular instance, I had the opportunity to join the Suburban Chicago PHP meetup and discuss some of the work various teams at Microsoft have been contributing to make PHP run better on Windows. Some of the talking points included…

• Increasing PHP performance on Windows by doing simple things like re-compiling the PHP core engine with a modern compiler
• Offering bytecode caching in IIS7 through the Windows Cache Extension for PHP
• Creating an installer with the frameworks, the tools, the server configs and the applications to get up and running quickly
• Having a native SQL Server Driver for PHP
• Developing toolkits, SDKs and sample code to easily take advantage of components in the Microsoft Web Platform including Windows Azure
• Providing guidance on Running PHP applications on IIS
• Including the all-important URL Rewrite Module to give developers control over their URL paths that lead to an SEO happy site
• And providing tools to help you optimize your SEO practices in the SEO Toolkit

It’s great to see the amount of work that has been done in such a short amount of time to make the Microsoft Web Platform the best platform to run your PHP applications on.

As an added bonus (and a promise to the meetup group) here are the slides from my presentation on Make Web Not War…

I would like to thank everyone who came out to the first Chicago Silverlight user group meeting last night. We had a great turn out with some excellent dialog on the new features of Silverlight 4.

As stated, I borrowed from Karen Corby’s session at PDC as it provides a nice roundup of some of the great new features in Silverlight 4 including drag/drop, right-click handling, printing, web cam integration, network multicast support, as well as new rich text and Bidi support. Not to mention the new out-of-browser support for COM integration!

You can grab all of the resources used in last night’s presentation from Karen’s Blog as well as the PDC website. I sprinkled a few others in as well…

• Microsoft Silverlight 4 Overview from PDC2009
• Slide deck (PPT)
• Samples
• http://silverlight.net
• Get Started with Silverlight
• Silverlight 4 Beta Information
• A guide to Silverlight 4 (Tim Heuer)

A received a note from Anthony Handley a few weeks back feeling out my thoughts around renaming (and re-chartering) the Chicago Designers and Developers User Group (CD2) to the Chicago Silverlight User Group. I thought it was a great idea as it provided a directed focus on what the topics and general direction of the group would be. It would only help the community at large understand the conversations that were taking place.

The intention of the group from the beginning was to bring the conversations between designers and developers closer together from a platform agnostic approach. As Anthony expounds on below, the group started to gravitate to more discussions focused on a particular area – Silverlight. Changing the name only solidifies the charter of the groups intent to the community and provides a means to bring more people together around a common cause (a “community”).

We are still able to facilitate conversations and idea sharing between designers and developers through events such as RIApalooza. Myself, along with the leaders of the Chicago Silverlight user group and the Chicago Adobe user group are currently in the planning stages of RIApalooza 3. More details to come.

Here is Anthony’s message…

In the past 18 months, the Chicago Designers and Developers User Group has sought to walk the lines between design and development while remaining platform agnostic. We’ve had some great presentations and speakers in the past; however, it has become increasingly difficult to find and schedule topics that appeal to designers and developers in both the Adobe and Microsoft worlds. After careful introspection and evaluation, the CD2 leadership team have chosen to clarify our place in the community and focus on Microsoft Silverlight & WPF.

And so, we’re extremely excited to announce the creation of The Chicago Silverlight User Group. The core purpose of the group (better designer/developer collaboration) hasn’t changed, but includes a renewed focus as we concentrate on all that Silverlight and WPF have to offer as a rich platform. We invite all of CD2′s members to continue to join us in this new and excited SIG in the coming months.

In effect, this is the sunset of CD2 as we know it today. We realize that some of the content we sought to bring to CD2 is already capably provided by the likes of IxDA and the Chicago Area Adobe User Groups. We believe these groups also add value to the designer and developer communities.

The new user group’s inaugural meeting will be at 6PM on Wednesday, March 3rd at The Illinois Technology Association (ITA) 200 S. Wacker Drive, 15th Floor | Chicago, IL 60606

We will be launching a new registration website in the coming weeks. If you have any questions or comments about The Chicago Silverlight User Group, please contact us at the email addresses below.

I am happy to report that I will be speaking at the (re)inaugural meeting of the Chicago Silverlight user group on March 3rd. We will be discussing the new features of Silverlight 4.