Installing PHP 5.2 on Windows 7 IIS 7.5

I had a bit of fun upgrading my Windows 7 machine to PHP 5.2 the other day. There’s an installer available that goes most of the way but didn’t quite work for me (there’s also an installer available on www.php.net, I’m not sure how they differ).

The first problem was that my installation of IIS didn’t have the FastCGI module installed. This was pretty easy to rectify, in the IIS administrator go to Modules and then click the ‘Configure Native Modules’ link and then click the ‘Register’ button. The FastCGI module will live somewhere like ‘C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\iisfcgi.dll’. Then I manually added a handler for PHP files, although if you add the module with the correct ‘FastCgiModule’ name, a re-install should correctly add the handler.

After this was set up, I was able to load up PHP pages but they weren’t being rendered properly, because it looked like the PHP code wasn’t being evaluated and was just getting outputted as plain text. This confused me for a while and I thought the installer hadn’t done its job. But after firing up Fiddler, I saw this header in the response from the server – X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.14, which suggested the file was getting handed to PHP which was doing something with it. So I guessed there must be a problem somewhere in the PHP config file, php.ini. After searching around in there, I discovered this setting - short_open_tag = Off. This means any PHP files that use <? as their opening tag instead of <?php will not get evaluated, and turning that option on fixed my problems. One other thing to note is that an IIS reset seems to be required for any changes to that config file, since when using FastCGI the PHP executable stays resident in memory rather than restarting for every request.

Virtual PC on Windows 7

I decided to jump in and upgrade to Windows 7, because I keep hearing it’s what Vista should have been. And it’s OK. I think I’m getting too old to get excited about OS upgrades, these days I just get annoyed about what’s been broken.

But today I had need to fire up a virtual machine so launched Virtual PC 2007. It told me it was unable to get the network connection up and running and offered to fix it, but then couldn’t find the location of my setup files. Not to worry I thought, probably the best plan is to just reinstall the whole thing. So I uninstalled then attempted to re-install but was told Virtual PC 2007 doesn’t work on Windows 7 so it refused to install it (even though it was clearly working at least a little bit for me). But then I noticed there was a new version of Virtual PC available that would work on Windows 7. So I downloaded that to try and fix my problem. Unfortunately this new version of Virtual PC requires a CPU that has virtualisation built-in. Sadly my CPU is lacking that feature so I couldn’t install this new version.

So if you have Windows 7 and a CPU that doesn’t have the right features then you are basically stuffed. I have managed to get round the problem by rolling back my Windows installation a couple of days using System Restore. Virtual PC 2007 seems to work fine except for the lack of network support, but if you don’t already have Virtual PC installed then you will be somewhat stuck.