p. Microsoft is eager to announce availability of the Go Live release of Microsoft FastCGI Extension for IIS 5.1/6.0 (FastCGI Extension) as a free download from the IIS community site, www.iis.net. The Go Live release is the last step in the Microsoft beta process and represents thehighest level of quality and reliability. For the first time, customers have a license that permits them to deploy the FastCGI Extension on their production Internet Information Services 6.0 (IIS 6) Web servers.

p. The new OO features in PHP 5 are not limited to private, protected and public variables in your scripts – some significant changes have been made under the hood that allow extensions to really hook into the engine and allow much greater flexibility for integrating support for external object models such as COM, Java, .Net and Corba. It was an excellent opportunity to revitalize COM support, as it was suffering from the limitations of the PHP 4 object model – limitations that had resulted in some hacks, both in the extension code itself and in the scripts of people using the extension. With that in mind, I decided to rewrite the COM support from scratch and drop backwards compatibility for the uglier aspects of the PHP 4 COM extension.