Microsoft and the Game of Catch-Up #drupalcon

By Dee-Ann LeBlanc (@deele) Mar 10, 2011

For someone who's spent most of her career writing about Linux and open source, it was a little brain-bending to see a Microsoft (news, site) booth at DrupalCon 2011. I managed to drag Mark Brown, senior product manager for the Microsoft Web Platform Team, away from the booth for a bit of a chat.

Why Here?

Apparently the most common question Brown hears at Drupal (news, site) and other open source events is, "What are you doing here?" Fortunately he approaches that question with humor and a bit of humility, as far as owning up to Microsoft's attitude in the past and focusing on the future.

The long and sordid tale he spins starts back in 2007, when trying to run anything PHP-related on Microsoft Windows was a nightmare: PHP binaries were out of date and weren't maintained, there was no feature parity and there were huge security holes. The standard Windows CGI handler launched a new process with every PHP request, causing such a heavy load on systems as processes were created and destroyed that people just avoided doing anything CGI on Windows servers. Those who did use PHP on Windows boxes were mixing PHP modules from various sources, some of which were single-threaded, and others were multi-threaded, which caused no end of trouble — IIS is single-threaded and has no thread safety checks.

On top of that, Microsoft IIS had grown up organically, with features being added over time, and the resulting patchwork server made it difficult to add support for other technologies such as PHP and CGI. Then elements at Microsoft realized that, to stay relevant and be used at all as a web platform, it couldn't just support ASP and ASP.NET. There was a huge community of PHP developers who would never build products on its servers.

Fixing the Stack

To say there was a lot to do was an understatement. Microsoft, the 500-pound gorilla of the software world, was in the position of having to play catch-up. The first thing the Microsoft team did was to create a module called FASTCGI, which created an app pool for PHP requests. This act eliminated the constant creation and destruction of processes. One problem solved.

Their second move was to re-architect IIS 7 from the ground up. Using Brown's own words, it made the web platform more like Apache (news , site). IIS 7 was modular, with most things turned off by default, so it had a much smaller footprint and would have fewer security risks from people forgetting to turn off unneeded features. They also changed the processing pipeline, creating a URL rewrite module similar to Apache's mod_rewrite because readable URLs are so important for SEO.

Because PHP apps are compiled at run time, it also need caching. They wrote wincache, their own version of memcache, and made it in some ways the Swiss army knife of caching. But that still didn't take care of all of the issues. By this point they had a native PHP driver for SQL Server, but when they heard that Drupal 7 was adding PDO support, they realized this was their chance to improve their database handling. Microsoft partnered with Drupal developers, with Microsoft helping them with the SQL Server module, and the Drupal developers helping them implement PDO support.

Easier Installs

Once the stack was ready, the Microsoft team moved into the next phase. They started by releasing the Web Application Gallery, where Acquia's Drupal bundle was one of the first packages offered. Today it has over 60 free open source applications for multiple technology stacks (PHP, .NET, etc.) Microsoft also released the Web Platform Installer, which is essentially an apt-get or rpm for Windows that handles installation, dependencies and other basic issues.