In reply to Karl.

Visual has community editions, academic editions, standard, pro, team, ultimate editions. It is made to support any .NET language. There are 3P PHP extensions for it. But there are also one's for Cobol and a pluther of other languages.

Visual Studio is an excellent IDE, best I have ever used by quite some margin as it should be given its been around for near 20 years now. It lends itself far better to .NET development so why would they integrate PHP? MSIL is the target. One of the neat things about MSIL and the CLR is that its language independent. One can write code in C#, Visual Basic or any pluther of third party languages from Fortran to Cobol and inbetween that support MSIL.

Microsoft's goal is not to be 110% support of PHP. They already have the language, performance and platform to put it asunder. This is not a "We have completely turned around" corporation. They are the same corporation they have always been as is Adobe, as is Apple as is Amazon as is Oracle. They see what has become a considerable market and that is the target from a business aspect. Hence, Open Source. Infiltrate and defeat.

Adobe's new cloud platform of the Creative Suite is to be paired with a drag and drop online publishing system. I've not spoken with anyone who directly has had access to it. I have spoke to people (my brother) who says he knows two people who have and its just unreal.

Again, should be no surprise. Lots of folks are using Web.com, Wix, Wordpress, Joomla, this and that to create these sites with all forms of mixin / mashup capabilities in as far as functions go. Only a matter of When not IF the big boys jump in and via numbers of scale offer "CMS++" services that are cheap and better.

Google is perhaps the entity that had always had the least transition. Always for years siding on the side of "Open everything". As many have noticed they too are shifting gears. They have to. Thats business.

Web Matrix stands alone for a reason. Its not weird at all when you look at corporate goals. In fact in their advertising as I recall it even says, "Cant we all just get along" and has like a puzzle piece of ASP.NET and PHP. Dont know if its still there. They are not going to tightly bind say PHP into Visual Studio only to deprecate it 3-5 years down the road. Web Matrix is all about the same focus as MONO. Get PHP developers in open source to use MS products. Once using Microsoft products it affords Microsoft the ability to grab them into Microsoft goals in that open source/PHP market.

They never did this before.

Why?

Because ASP.NET was simply not capable of competing with PHP more or less Java. It was a resource cow and a slow one at that albeit even in ASP.NET 2.0 a cow that can be an enterprise cow if the farmer has enough money.

Now thats not the case anymore. ASP.NET paired with C# or Visual Basic is faster and less resource hungry (in most repsects) than PHP. MONO embraces the LinuxTribe. WPDotNet a Phalanger port of Wordpress 3.0 now three years? back showed a 300%+ performance improvement and is 100% PHP, theme, plugin compatible.

If you have used C# at all then you know as a programmer and just being completely impartial that with Visual Studio its just so much nicer to code in that say PHP and more versatile.

Its taken Microsoft 10+ years to get to where the development platform for ASP.NET is. Now they are moving to complete that.

Who knows, they may come along with a PHP.NET full blown solution. But either way, that spells the end of what people have enjoyed per se. I am rather surprised they have not.

Web Matrix sorta shows that they dont want the flagship to have any tight coupling.

They sorta can do as they please as they have the money to do it and the resources in as far as software engineers to do it.

But for people who think "Look they completely have changed their stripes" thats just silly.

They are an Omni Aggressive corporation who now has the platform, the means, the skills and even governmental support to change what the Internet was to what it will be.

Alot of people forget that not TOO awful long ago nations across the globe in partnership with Microsoft announced the largest geosync satellite network for the Net the world had ever known. Was like 170 some odd satellites all with the goal of regulation of the net. Paid for in full by global governance. All fell off the radar as that not the way to "do it". The way to do it is mulch-faceted but it starts with control of the software industries online. And thats exactly what we have saw happen and escalate.

NOW (and I do mean like NOW) all of a sudden a resurgence in Satellite Internet starts up.

Contrary to common believe global governments are not dumb. In fact, quite the opposite. Populations believe what they see and hear and then make judgements based upon it. Truth is we (especially in the west) are given so little information in popular news our judgements are like guiding 3 year olds. Literally. We are too lazy to seek more information and our media is now corporate business.

Globalization is a #1 goal and has been. This has resulted in the upheaval we see this very day in many areas. With globalization comes how to control it. The Internet is one of the prime focuses thereof. Cant control populations if cant control information.