On July 24, Microsoft released version 1.0 of their native SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=61 ... 597C21A2E2A&displaylang=en

Some months back I downloaded a beta version of this after having problems working with international characters (UTF-8) with PDO and MSSQL and impressively the SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP worked very well.

Congratulations to Microsoft for continuing with this and their recent contribution to ADODB.  I'm looking for better PDO support now

I totally missed this one until a few days ago, but VMware has released the ESXi Hypervisor free of charge.   They obviously see the pending challenge from Microsoft, Xen and Virtualbox and are hoping to gain traction and mindshare in the community - but I have one piece of advice for VMware.

If you want to regain the "developer" mindshare - those evangelists that sponsor VMware in their corporations - then restore the VMTN Subscription.

VMTN was my affordable way in to VMware - and because of that and my persistence in my current workplace, VMware now has over 20 ESX Enterprise license sales.