Windows Azure is Microsoft’s new Cloud Computing System and provides opportunity to run your ASP.NET websites combined with permanently running “worker” applications and an integrated storage system. While promoting its support for C# and Basic it’s possible to run any other language or native application in there as well … and so it’s supporting PHP, too.
It’s basically possible to have PHP applications running in Windows Azure Cloud. This implies to upload a full PHP interpreter binary including all desired extensions together with your set of PHP scripts.
I’m currently investigating on implementing a PHP library for conveniently accessing related Storage Services and on doing it I tried to activate one of the included extensions: cURL. Since it failed in the first I had to try a second time prior to get it running properly. In php.ini there is a line requiring uncommmenting
extension = php_curl.dll
This alone is selecting to include the named DLL containing cURL extension to PHP. However it isn’t including proper path to DLLs and that’s what was missing on my first trial. So I came back to php.ini, read the texts included with it slightly more thoroughly and so found requirement to uncomment another line reading
extension_dir = ext
afterwards. On next start cURL support was included and so I could continue my efforts on accessing Storages.
