The two companies also plan to work to ensure a production-quality PHP runtime environment for IIS 6.0 for Windows Server 2004, and for IIS 7.0 on Longhorn. Both vendors will participate in the PHP community to help developers planning to deploy PHP applications on Windows Server.

Zend in the first quarter of 2007 plans to start using the PHP improvements in its Zend Core product line. A technology preview of an updated Windows version of Zend Core is available . Also, Zend will use the technology for its Zend Platform product line to support business-critical PHP environments on Windows Server.

At this juncture, Microsoft and Zend are not announcing any tie-in between PHP and Microsoft's popular Visual Studio development platform. But that may occur in the future, Hilf said. The two companies are discussing it, he said.

Microsoft is not the first major software vendor to align with Zend. IBM also has worked with Zend to enable PHP deployments on IBM's Cloudscape and DB2 databases, via the Zend Core for IBM package.

Also at the conference: