Microsoft Bridges PHP and .NET

Microsoft has released a new open-source project that bridges PHP and .NET using Representational State Transfer (REST).

Microsoft released the PHP Toolkit for ADO.NET Data Services, which makes it easier for PHP developers to take advantage of the ADO.NET Data Services, a set of features recently added to the .NET Framework. The PHP Toolkit for ADO.NET Data Services is an open source project funded by Microsoft and developed by Persistent Systems. It is available on Microsoft's CodePlex community development site.

In a blog post about the release, Peter Galli, a Microsoft open-source community manager, said:

"These services, which were previously referred to by the codename Project Astoria, expose a wide range of data sources through a RESTful service interface.

"There is full support for ADO.NET Data Services in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 as well as in the upcoming Visual Studio 2010, which includes direct support for both creating and consuming data services directly from the development environment."

Also, in a separate blog post detailing the new project, Claudio Caldato, senior program manager on Microsoft's Interoperability Technical Strategy team, said:

You should consider two aspects of the PHP Toolkit:

At design time: the PHP Toolkit generates proxy classes based on the metadata exposed by the ADO.NET Data Services (built with Visual Studio, including Express editions).

At run time: you call from your code the PHP proxy classes, so that you can easily program against the ADO.NET Data Service using a set of local PHP classes that represent the structure of the remote data. Using RESTful services over HTTP, the communication between the PHP application and ADO.NET Data Services is taken care of by the PHP proxy classes and the Toolkit libraries, but of course you can look at (or edit) this code.