Now that the Jet-lag has worn off (all-night flights suck, even when they are first class) I figure it would be the perfect time to blog about my recent visit to Microsoft's Web Dev Summit. A few weeks ago I got an invite from Brian (who thanks to Wez he got through my spam filters) to come to Microsoft and see what kind of cool stuff they are doing and to give some feedback from the "enemy camp" so to speak ;-) on the stuff they are doing. I thought it'd be a great opportunity to see what's going on the other side of the fence and readily agreed. So, last week, I caught a plane to Redmond where I joined a number of other PHP luminaries (Wez, Marcus, Frank, Laura, etc...) and a lone Ruby developer (Yes, they do exist!). Over the next two days we had a very tightly packed schedule of presentations from Microsoft folks on things ranging from IIS7 to LINQ. Despite the very tight schedule we've got a number of opportunities to have informal talks with Microsoft developers which in my experience were quite i...

A new stable release of FUDforum is now available for download. This release incorporates all of the changes found in the previous two release candidates in addition to an updated German translation and a newly added Vietnamese translation as well. All users of FUDforum are encouraged to upgrade to this release for improved performance and stability. Additional information about the content of this release can be found here: http://fudforum.org/forum/index.php?t=msg&th=6994 and http://fudforum.org/forum/index.php?t=msg&th=6916 here. The installation and upgrade scripts are located at their usual location at: http://fudforum.org/download.php

The slides from my two talks at PHP|Works are now available online for download in PDF and Flash formats, they can be found here: http://ilia.ws/talks/. You'll need to scroll to the bottom of the page to find the download links. Overall I think the talks went very well, and I hope that all the people who have attended found the material covered interesting and/or informative. I won't presume to assume the talks were fun, but c'mon what do you expect from a technical talk :-)

Huzzah! The final release candidate of 5.2.0, RC4 is out, which means the final release is just around the corner. The tarballs can be found here: http://downloads.php.net/ilia/php-5.2.0RC4.tar.bz2 (71456d89419e5b67c59aca713a3c86f4) http://downloads.php.net/ilia/php-5.2.0RC4.tar.gz (41c5ac4a378266b17a7fde9565325cb9) Given that this is a final release, this is the last chance to identify major issues or regressions. So, please test your code against this release to make sure that everything is working, and if not, let us know.

The third and possibly the final release candidate of PHP 5.2.0 is now available for download. http://downloads.php.net/ilia/php-5.2.0RC3.tar.bz2 (79a9e8ecd8edcfcc033bbd49967ad47a) http://downloads.php.net/ilia/php-5.2.0RC3.tar.gz (735c8f0385483afc732c09c5bb4257a3) The number of changes are fairly small, which is always good when nearing the final release, but there were 2 important fixes that need attention. One is fix for a memory corruption in the new memory manager, something that could've caused random, hard to reproduce crashes. The second was a fix in the session extension's shutdown order, which caused problems when native objects (objects created by other PHP extensions) were stored inside $_SESSION. Please try this release and give you feedback via qa mailing list or via this blog, either way we'd like to hear how this release works with your code.