Microsoft Courts PHP Developers with Reporting Services SDK -- Visual Studio Magazine

Microsoft Courts PHP Developers with Reporting Services SDK

By David Ramel
04/09/2010

Microsoft, continuing its strategy of opening up its products to developers who use non-Microsoft technologies, yesterday announced a software development kit to help PHP developers use SQL Server Reporting Services in Web apps.

PHP has been getting a lot of attention from Microsoft lately. Within just the last two months, the company has announced a command-line tool for PHP to deploy applications on Windows Azure, OData interoperability with PHP and guidance for using PHP with the Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse plug-in.

The new SQL Server Reporting Services SDK for PHP provides a simple API to let developers list available reports and manage the rendering of reports in PHP applications, and also provide custom parameters from a PHP Web form, according to a Interoperability@Microsoft blog post.

The open-source project hosted on CodePlex works with the free SQL Server 2008 Express with Advanced Services edition. The Business Intelligence Development Studio bundled with that free edition is used to design reports. Persistent Systems Ltd. worked on the project with Microsoft, according to the CodePlex page.

"This edition includes the SQL Server 2008 Express database engine as well as graphical administration tools and the Reporting Services server components for creating, managing, and deploying tabular, matrix, graphical, and free-form reports," according to the blog post.

Speaking to this site about Microsoft’s increased emphasis on openness, Jean Paoli, general manager of Interoperability Strategy, said, “Mixed IT environments are a reality for many customers. We take a multi-faceted approach to interoperability that includes collaboration with competitors, partners and the open source community.

"We have released interoperability technical bridges for popular products including Windows Azure, SQL Server and Silverlight to connect them with various platforms, languages and tools like PHP, Java, Ruby and Eclipse,” Paoli continued. “We expect to continue adding others in line with customer demand."

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Visual Studio Devs Demand Claude 3.5 Sonnet AI: 'Why Is VSC Always Preferred?'

The brand-new Visual Studio 2022 v17.12 lets devs specify the AI model they want to use with the baked-in GitHub Copilot, but some are clamoring for more options, such as the latest/greatest Claude 3.5 Sonnet model from Anthropic that is available in VS Code.
SQL Database in Microsoft Fabric in Preview for Faster AI Apps

Microsoft's early embrace of advanced AI in its dev tooling continues apace with the new public preview of SQL database in Microsoft Fabric, the company's analytics/data platform.
Microsoft Seeks to Sort & Simplify its Agentic AI Dev Story

The company will infuse multi-agent runtime tech developed in its AutoGen research project into its production-ready Semantic Kernel SDK, both open source.
Uno Platform Unveils 'Hot Design' Tool for Cross-Platform .NET Apps

Uno Platform provided a new take on visual designers for .NET app development, claiming a breakthrough that changes code at runtime rather than the design stage.
Simple k-NN Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of k-nearest neighbors regression to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, k-NN regression is often slightly less accurate, but is very simple to implement and customize, and the results are highly interpretable.