Though I do allot of PHP development work, I still think ASP.NET is the best option for new web development

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Why ? Why is Microsoft supporting PHP ? Is there any secret or sacred behind it ?

It's not accurate to say that Microsoft "Supports" PHP per se.

Microsoft supports Windows and our other products and some of the users of THOSE products need a better experience relative to PHP.

They're probably supporting it to help grow their IIS market share.

"A lot", dude, "A LOT"! =)

"a lot of" or "allot for"?

Are there any plans for php for .net? There's ironpython and ironruby and J# but I've never heard anyone mention php for .net even though it is arguably the most used web development language.

@douglas see www.codeplex.com/.../View.aspx or php-compiler.net/.../doku.php

I don't think Phalanger is running on the DLR yet, it would be great for Microsoft to form a team lke the IronPyhon or IronRuby team around Phalanger.

@douglas technically there is Phalanger (http://www.codeplex.com/Phalanger) which compiles php into msil and reportedly runs some sites faster than php (though i don't know the stats nor I don't know how that will hold up with php5.3). That seems to be more of a research and university project than something on the level of Iron Python or Iron Ruby.

though I'd rather see some visual studio love for ruby & php that is better/higher than what is currently out there with 3rd party tools. They work but they rarely keep up with the latest versions of the interpreters. I'd totally pay for a vs extension as long as it kept up with the edge versions of those languages.

I would say the reason is similar to getting behind its support for jquery and coming out with silverlight -- microsoft is lagging behind in the web world and it needs to appeal to the community at large. "We only use asp.net" or "we only use windows IIS servers" doesnt cut it

Do you have any other alternatives other than supporting PHP?

Of course, we could NOT do anything with PHP. Duh

I think the reason for supporting PHP is that PHP now has good share in the web apps development and Microsoft wants to grab all of them to be hosted on their servers. By supporting PHP, Microsoft can get new customers start using Windows Server systems by hosting their apps on IIS7. This will help Microsoft to expose the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySql, PHP) users to start knowing about the Microsoft products like Windows Server, IIS7, Sql Server etc.

I feel that Microsoft is moving in a right direction to expand their scope and presence by supporting the Open Source community in lot many ways like this one.

why microsoft is not develop language "php.net"? .net also java,c++ then why not PHP?