After 2 weeks of inaction 5.2.0 final release is finally in sight. A few minutes ago I've released the last (I mean it this time) release candidate of 5.2.0, RC5. If all goes well a week from now 5.2.0 final will be out ready for use. In the meantime I'd like to ask once again that everyone try this RC, which can downloaded from here: http://downloads.php.net/ilia/php-5.2.0RC5.tar.bz2 (md5sum: 9a7fb788fbfd2beb8ed7aecb0a7d1598) I don't think you'd be able to find any major issues or regressions in this RC, but if you do certainly let me know, if necessary RC6 is not out of the question.

If you have been monitoring PHP's internal mailing list you probably know that over the last few weeks we've been locked in a stalemate in regard to the API revision of the filter extension brought to light by Dan from our documentation team. This is also the reason why despite this being early October PHP 5.2 is still not out. Fortunately, after mediation with Derick and Pierre the two protagonists of the filter conundrum a compromise was finally reached. I took Pierre's proposed patch for the filter extension and based on it made a fairly series of adjustments yielding a very clear and flexible API (I hope) that seems to keep everyone happy. The patch was committed late last night and given lack of complaints today, I think we've finally got this issue resolved. YEY! The only downside, is that my proposal to rename the filter extension to "Ilia' Awesome Filter Extension" was shot-down, with only Tony being in favor, oh well, I guess you can't have it all. On a related note, since filter issue is n...

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 :-)