This is a reminder to anyone planning on attending tonight’s Cup ‘o Code meet up.

• When: Tuesday, November 20th 2007
• Where: Cup ‘o Soul at 906 W. Fairbanks Ave
• How much: The coffee and wi-fi are FREE!

RSVP: Facebook, Upcoming

Thats right, mark your calendars: CFPHP and Cup o’ Soul will be hosting Cup o’ Code sessions every Tuesday night! Previously we were planning on reserving the conference room whenever it was available, but they like us so much that they have invited us back on a regular schedule.

Cup o’ Soul offers a fantastic environment for us to meet informally and chat over great coffee and food. They also offer free wi-fi so be sure to bring a laptop.

As always, the coffee will be on us!

If you were to look at PlanetPHP right now, you would notice that the five most recent articles posted are about the same thing: the FastCGI extension by Microsoft for their IIS web server. Finally, PHP developers who develop for the Windows platform can have a reliable, production-ready home for their code. Previously, the only way to get PHP to run under IIS was to run PHP as a binary. This single-threaded approach was a serious performance bottleneck for Windows-based PHP applications for many years. Now those days are gone…

So what is one to make of this? Has Microsoft given up on their own server-side language? Hardly. But they certainly have made a noticeable effort to improve their relationship with PHP developers.

Just a few days ago, the MS Web Developers Summit took place. Here, Microsoft invited some of the most prominent PHP developers in our community out for a few days in hopes to reach out and create open relationships with developers of other platforms.

They didn’t stop there either…

A few days before the Summit buzz, people were blogging about Microsoft’s first-ever PHP extension for their MSSQL Server. Apparently, the previous extension was almost completely unusable.

One year before that, I made a post briefly mentioning Zend and Microsoft working together to create a better environment for PHP to run under on Windows. We are now beginning to see the true results of their combined efforts.

Folks, things are changing. We can now see that two very different and competitive companies, with two very different visions, can not only co-exist in the same industry, but can also work together to improve their platforms for their developers. Being entirely a LAMP devloper, I can’t say that I have much practical PHP + Windows experience. I’m curious if anyone from the group has any? This would make for a fantastic presentation or discussion if anyone is interested.

Tonight marked our first “Cup-O-Code” meetup and it was a blast. Thanks go to everyone who was able to make it. We will be getting together next week on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 8:00 PM.

In case you missed the last note, Cup-O-Code is a very informal coworking session held at Cup-O-Soul in Winter Park. There’s not much more to it than that: just a bunch of geeks who enjoy drinking good coffee and working amongst each other.

We will do our best to keep the day and time relatively consistent each week, but since they offer a free conference room to the public, it’s first come, first served. Be sure to keep checking the site or subscribe to the feed so you can stay updated.

RSVP:  Facebook, Upcoming

See you next week!

Mark your calendars. There is a lot of great stuff coming up:

Tuesday, November 6th 2007

• 7:00 PM: CFPHP and Cup-O-Soul are hosting “Cup-O-Code” co-working sessions. For more information, head to the discussion or register on Upcoming or Facebook.
• 7:00 PM: ADOGO will be meeting at DeVry. Presentations will be on “Continuous Integration using CruiseControl” and “Adobe AIR Twitter Walk-through”. Check out the ADOGO Meetings page for all the details.

Thursday, November 8th 2007

• 7:00 PM: ORUG will be holding their November meeting. Presentations will be on Radient and ActionMailer. Read more about it on the official post.

Saturday, November 17th 2007

• 3:00 PM: CFPHP will be holding their November meeting. The topic is currently open.

Saturday, December 15th 2007

• 3:00 PM: CFPHP will be holding their December meeting. The topic is currently open.

January 2008 (Specific Date Unknown)

• Refresh Orlando will be reorganizing! Join the discussion to get the ball rolling.