[dragonmantank]

Huh? PHP and IIS work perfectly fine together. MS has worked really hard to make PHP a first-class language on their OS. PHP 5.3 and IIS 7.5+ are dead simple to get working. Azure features PHP support as one of their main features.

I've even got a client on an ancient Windows 2000 box running PHP. Took all of an hour to get running. Yes, not the most preferred stack, but they aren't at odds.

[jiggy2011]

If you are using IIS/PHP how interchangeable is that with LAMP? In other words if I develop locally using IIS/Windows can I just drop the same code onto a LAMP server without breaking anything?

[jtreminio]

There are a few functions that are not available on Windows.

If you hard-code paths in the code that refer to Linux-specific things, it won't work in Windows.

That said, if it works on Windows, it will most likely work on Linux, but a VM should still be favored due to the probability of prod being Linux.

[wvenable]

I run PHP on Windows but with the full LAMP static (Apache running on Windows) and deploy to Linux without modification. I suspect you could also do that with IIS (as PHP abstracts the server interface) but I have not tried it.