When it comes to the enterprise software development market, Microsoft pretty much has it cornered. After all, who else can boast of a complete software ecosystem, fully supported by the company behind one of the world’s wealthiest men? From Visual Studio to the various certifications, VB being taught in schools and even the wide penetration of the Visual Studio family of development environments, MS has pretty much got it in one. But it’s .net that seals the deal: the cross-language runtime environment is perfect.

PHP, .net and Silverlight will be integrated out of the box, along with Visual Studio 2008. The project has long been in the works, but our sources have informed us of an impending announcement that PHP 6 will ship with .net. (Our sources are unreliable, but their information is fascinating! - Ashleigh Brilliant.) Versions 1.0, 2.0 or 3.5 of the .net framework will be a part of the basic requirements of PHP 6 as a result. Here’s a sample:

The .net integration was made possible by the Phalanger project, which has been working hard on this for quite a while - with the help of Redmond, of course.

The Visual Studio IDE typically ships as an IDE with a particular language, merging together when additional languages are added. Microsoft has since released Visual Studio 2008 Shell, an IDE with no particular language environment, in which PHP/Phalanger can be added. Debugging of .net and Silverlight is possible thanks to the integration of Visual Studio. Once installed, a new PHP project will be available from within Visual Studio 2008. WinBinder now has competition for Windows RAD PHP development:

Sysadmins with Windows servers running applications that conflict with the .net CLR are advised to upgrade to the Intercal interpreter once PHP 5 support is dropped.

Take a look at the following scenario:

while($var)
{
foreach ($var as $val)
{
if ($val) break 2;
}
}


Now, consider all this is inside another while loop. If someone else comes in and refactors, taking out the foreach loop, your ‘break 2;’ suddenly not only breaks out of the while($var) but also the loop outside of it. Big trouble.

Of course, GOTO is associated with Bad Things. A GOTO of sorts is coming to PHP 6, and is actually a good thing. It’s not so much a GOTO as a named break - it allows you to use your break statements to go to a particular point in code execution, as opposed to all this messy nested looping and loop numbering. Here’s a sample:

for ($i = 0; $i < 9; $i++)
{
if (true) {
break blah;
}
echo "not shown";
blah:
echo "iteration $i\n";
}
?>


I believe it was discussed at a meeting some time back; see here for the meeting notes. In any case, it’s a useful addition, provided it isn’t misused; hopefully we won’t end up with the spaghetti code messes of years gone by.