1. The default driver php_mssql.dll doesn’t work with SQL Azure. The Internets say that support for php_mssql is dropped from PHP 5.3. I have PHP 5.2.10 and was a bit surprised when I can connect to any SQL server instance in the network (2005/2008) using php_mssql but not to SQL Azure. The all too generic Unable to connect to server message was also not helping. You have to use the new MSSQL driver for PHP.
2. After you download and unzip the new driver you’ll see a set of DLLs with different versions. For PHP 5.2.10 you have to use php_sqlsrv_52_ts_vc6.dll. Rename it as php_sqlsrv.dll and copy it to the <PHP>\ext directory.
3. Then add extension=php_sqlsrv.dll to your php.ini
4. After that, you have to connect to the SQL Azure database with MultipleActiveResultSets option turned off.

   sqlsrv_connect( "server_name",
       array( "MultipleActiveResultSets" => 0, ... ) );
   

Voila! Now you’re all set to pull data from the clouds!

With my experience developing applications with Microsoft technologies, the biggest gripe I have so far is the lack of flexibility. I can recall in one instance where I tried to log raw XML messages going through Geneva libraries turned out to be very difficult. The successful documented scenarios, happy path, in other words work marvelously. Turning on WCF logging didn’t log the RST message coming to Geneva. Solution to that problem turned out to be overriding the XML writer method to write the stream to a file. Ultimately was able to get it solved without having to do that.

Coming back to Azure, it seems that it’s not a low level virtualized environment like Amazon EC2. The lines are still blurry to me when it’s positioned somewhere in between EC2 and Google App Engine. One problem of having a platform layer (Windows Azure OS) that sits above the actual OS is, the way of doing things will be different. One major advantage of EC2 is if you boot up a Windows machine, it’s Windows. Azure, things are different. Comparing, a major advantage is things can be simplified to a jaw droppingly awesome level. With the development frabric installed which lets you test your applications on your local machine before deploying to Windows Azure platform, Windows programs you develop through Visual Studio can be deployed within seconds. You don’t have to learn any additional deployment methods. Great for application developers. If you want to do something at a lower level you need to learn more.

The most interesting part for me atleast is the support for FastCGI. Through that, you can call native code. Like PHP for example. The PHP Azure SDK seems really interesting.