Rafael Dohms

This year I was honored to be invited to participate as a member of the PHP Community in Microsoft’s Web Developer Summit, so I took it upon myself to represent the huge PHP community in Brazil and bring on our opinions and beliefs.

For those that don’t know what this event is about, let me give you a glimpse into what it tries to do and accomplish and tell you what came out of it in 2009. MSWDS is all about communication, its a yearly event that allows Microsoft to get in touch with key players of the PHP community and interact with them on various levels, that means getting to ask us questions and letting us rant and ask them questions. Looks fun and cruel at the same time, but its a really awesome and effective way of getting Microsoft and PHP to do better business together. This means getting better tools and better performing PHP Apps on MS platforms, and getting both sides to know more about how the other operates.

So this was a chance for Microsoft to ask us all the questions they have piled over the last year and us a chance to cry and scream whatever grievance we had. Over 3 days we shared our notes and went over various products and opinions and shared quite a few beers and dinners at the Redmond Commons Campus.

Microsoft has been very active in the PHP area and even tough this is always received with skepticism by the overall community their actions are generating a lot of benefits for us, and windows users in general. You cannot be right all the time, so Microsoft is still stumbling over a few items, but let’s look at some of what was shared with us. Keep in mind that the final day of the conference is under NDA so it is not included here.

One of the highlights of the event was a project lead by Garrett Serrack describing the process and plans for making PHP and associated libs easier to compile from source on Windows, a project that can surely give Windows a push as a viable platform for PHP, since custom PHP compilations are a big part of PHP sites. Also very interesting were the news of WebPI and IIS. IIS is working on being a centralized dashboard for system developers and administrators and new tools like the SEO toolkit are laying down new track for innovation. Road ahead for this is still long but MS got a lot of feedback on the kind of deploy and maintenance oriented services we developers would like to see, like work on WinCache to offer more features and make it share the spotlight with APC.

The WebPI project made life for PHP App users a breeze, its simplicity and App gallery make it very simple to install a complete web platform and get a site up and running. This, however, is not the same for Developers, we felt like we needed more, solutions were gathered and amongst them are multiple side-by-side versions of PHP and other Apps, automated testing and closed cycle solutions that can contribute back to our applications as well as make our life deploying and testing before releases much easier on this platform.

During our airing of grievances many topics came up which MS really needs to address. The long road to new projects and solutions and all the judicial red tape that needs to be cut was the starting point and showed MS they are the only ones slowing themselves down, also the areas of the world that need more attention from MS evangelists. Recurring topics like drivers for SQL Server and better developer tools for IE7 IE8 came up as well.

One matter that generated heated arguments was the Codeplex Foundation which because of ill-timed and not planned comments of a “info-mercial like” talk got the exact response we expect, angry and rebellious discussion. Unfortunately Microsoft is still a huge corporation and some of it still does not understand that the developer community does not want marketing pitches. The message hit home and some sessions reverted from that format, but the Codeplex idea was still not fully compatible with most of the people there. The topic was later brought up in a round-table discussion and disagreements were sorted out, showing that MS is willing to correct some mistakes, and making clear what the intended audience is for the Codeplex Foundation project.

Some sessions had .NET solutions in their heart and were not very effective in communication, some were interesting enough to generate in us the desire to copy them over, but in my opinion these were not really in their right place for the objective of this event. New technologies like PowerShell, Azure and Silverlight got lots of attention and their explanations showed some in the room that they could get much more from them then they though, like powershell which is much more powerful then i had known until now.

Silverlight bought on new talks with its use in Bing Maps which is now live with incredibly smooth effects, which got attention of the community outside the event because of the “extra” plugin, but in my opinion, technologies are there to be used and google also needs some competition to step up again. Microsoft’s skill for naming projects was attacked multiple times especially after we figure out the “ASP.NET Ajax Toolkit” was a ajax library that had nothing to do with ASP.NET and this was dully noted by MS for future naming.

Microsoft also had a very good opportunity to hear from main players in the PHP community about the community itself, Ramsey went over some concepts of UGs and I talked about the new organization of UGs in Brazil (simple slides) and how our community has responded to its growth, we also had sessions by Marco and Keith on uncons and community participation and a few sessions on tools and frameworks/closed apps.

One of the most important sessions showed us how we can get in touch with Microsoft and gave us some insight on the internal structure and roles of all MS related posts. This session was great and also opened the floor to questions from both sides.

The end result of this is very positive and we may only see results in a few months or even a year. The important message i got out of this is that Microsoft is working hard on matching linux as a viable deploy platform and a development platform, but more then that they are looking to go one better and innovate. Investing on professionals that develop PHP and its related libraries is also a way that MS can help PHP be even more viable on Windows, and right now, I guess it its and you should give it a try.

I look forward to some of the new tools and features of current products that were showcased in open and closed sessions, I believe MS has a chance of doing great things and clean up their game, if you still believe in that ancient image the company carried.

For the Organizational Crew of MSWDS all I have to say is that you did more then an awesome job, hotel was great, evening social events were a awesome opportunity to get into more elaborate talks about the days topics and the whole event went down without a glitch, thank you very much for all the hard work.

User Groups are today one of the greatest driving forces behind PHP, together they form PHP’s greatest triumph, the community. Around the world everyday we see new groups coming together and starting new activities, sharing knowledge, promoting PHP, contributing to PHP Projects, or just plain having fun and drinking. Its really a wonderful environment, especially for the members, who get to experience and benefit from various perks brought to them by the UG.

In this whole scenario we have a few unsung heroes, the UG leaders. Fearless souls that sacrifice whatever free time they have to give back to the community and make our PHP world a better place. Ok, so they are not generally unsung, most of the community knows their names by heart, great leaders and trend-setters like Ben Ramsey, Michelangelo van Dam, Stefan Koopmanschap, Lorna Jane, Er Galvão, Silvano Girardi, Adler Medrado, Sandro Souza, Bruno “Porkaria” and countless other I have no space to mention here. I’m also a community leader, working along with my colleagues Augusto Pascutti, Anderson Casimiro and Ivan Rosolen on the PHPSP UG in São Paulo, so this may very well be a biased post, but I recon its worth the writeup, not for myself but at least for all these other dedicated people who are making a difference out there.

I say unsung heroes because we are all used to see their success stories but hardly ever get in touch with the other side of UGs, the hard work and dealing with failures part of it. I have recently seen a trend of reactions to leaders which worry me in regard to the role of these leaders in the future of PHP, a flow of comments and acusations stating that leaders do it all for self-gain and self-promotion at the expense of the community at large. This seems to walk hand in hand with the fact stated above, that members rarely see the dark side of this story, due to the fact that we do not share our internal workings.

Leading a UG if often hard work and more than often leaders need to deal with failures, big and small. When you see a successful UG meeting you may fail to see other related events, like the drama to get a meeting place, find interesting speakers and topics, get the necessary gear, getting prizes to give out, finding partners and even getting food for the coffee break. All these are are pushed under the rug when the event is a success, even by us leaders.

Its not your regular pot of gold under the rainbow, and with it comes a lot of hard work, a sudden lack of free time and a not always positive raise in interest from everyone around, you will be in the spotlight, be it for good or bad. On the other hand, all efforts are worth it to get that feel-good feeling we get when we see people growing, learning and participating as a result of our efforts in whatever action we organized. That feeling is our objective, not just to feel it, but to spread it around, get more people to contribute and share that feeling with us.

This year’s testfest is an example, efforts to put it all together we enourmous from the core dev team to all UG leaders involved and everyone in the QA team. But the utter joy of seeing that percentage going up, new people filing for SVN accounts and new QA enthusiasts was worth the hassle to get it all underway.

All of these actions lay the path down for future PHP developers, new leaders will replace today’s leaders or join them in leading the groups, lack of work is definatively not a issue. And yes, UG leaders will get the spotlights but from all the leaders i have met, this spotlight is the last thing on their mind, its always about getting the next event underway, the next podcast out the door. They will benefit from their work, that’s inevitable, but I’m sure any of us can find at least one point where that leader’s work made our life easier/better, and these leaders were all in our place at some point, until they decided to act and do something. This goes further then just UGs, you can apply the same for frameworks, applications and X other initiatives, they all begun at this point.

So next time you attend a UG meeting, take a second to appreciate all the hard work put into it and ask yourself, “What can I do to help?”.