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