Phalanger, a PHP variant that runs on .NET, has been released. The IDE is based on Visual Studio Shell. VS Shell is the Visual Studio IDE with the Microsoft compiler stripped out. Distributed for free, this allows third parties to host their own languages in Visual Studio. It is seen by many as an attempt to challenge the growing popularity of the multi-language IDE Eclipse.
Currently Phalanger supports the .NET development including the WinForms designer. It also supports the old Silverlight 1.1 alpha. The Phalanger team is currently working on converting their code base to run on Silverlight 2.0 beta 1.
The .NET platform isn't the only one trying to lure PHP developers. As we reported in October, both IBM and Coucho have been making significant investments in the PHP on Java architecture.
The Phalanger compiler, currently in beta 3, and VS integration can be found on CodePlex.