It amazes me how many people assume Google wants to drive Microsoft out of business. From a ZDNet article: “The Chrome OS is a direct attack against Microsoft’s lucrative – albeit vulnerable – Windows operating system.”

“Lucrative?” Isn’t Google’s OS free? “Vulerable?” Most people don’t know enough to change browsers, let alone operating systems. Most of them want it to “just work,” not to be forced to learn new things.

Maybe, deep inside Google, in the minds of some of its most hardcore decision makers, Microsoft is the evil empire, to be vanquished heroically. But on a more realistic level, I think Google is happier when there’s more competition, not less. If you listen to many of the comments surrounding the release of Chrome and its source code, there is a distinct sense that Google itself is better off if there are a dozens major browsers, all competing and driving standards adoption and development.

So too, I think, with operating systems. Google is designing an open-source system that will, hopefully, lead to the creation of additional platforms and push others to make their user experiences better.

Google isn’t trying to take Microsoft down, but encouraging a more competitive marketplace, in the hope that competition will keep everyone innovative and honest.

Yeah yeah, do it in ASP.NET, I know. While I like C# as a language, I kind of hate ASP.NET as a framework, so what are you gonna do? Java was an option but the start-up time was too long for this project.

My first Google search for “PHP SQL Server 2005″ turned up the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP. “Well great!” I thought. It’s just a PHP extension, very easy to install on Windows. But I didn’t know the horrid depths into which I was about to sink.

The Microsoft driver comes with an example application and database. The application assumes you are connecting to a local database. There is scant information about remote databases.

The driver defines this function:

sqlsrv_connect($host[, $connectionOptions[, ...]]);

The example application tells you to set $host to (local). Supposedly this works. However, after scouring the internet for several days, and trying every permutation of hostname, Windows networking name, port, IP address, white space, and several other variables that shouldn’t have been in there, I’ve decided it doesn’t talk to remote servers nicely.

PDO‘s ODBC driver, on the other hand, and a quick visit to www.connectionstrings.com, worked wonderfully.

Here is how I needed to create the PDO object. I hope this is useful for someone else:

(ed. The symbol « is a line break that’s not in the real code.)

$host     = '1.2.3.4';
$port     = '1433';
$database = 'MyDatabase';
$user     = 'MyDatabaseUser';
$password = 'MyDatabasePassword';

$dsn = "odbc:DRIVER={SQL Server}; «
 SERVER=$server,$port;DATABASE=$database";

try {
  // connect
  $conn = new PDO($dsn,$user,$password);
} catch (PDOException $e) {
  // fancy error handling
}

Obviously, this is good news for all forward-looking, standards-aware, progressively-enhancing developers out there.

But even more important is the action from Microsoft: the community voiced an opinion and Microsoft listened and responded. To see any major corporation rethink their position because of community pressure is rare enough, but to see a complete reversal is truly an occasion to celebrate.

Hopefully this is indicative of a new attitude at Microsoft, one that supports or even embraces standards and the goals of progressive enhancement.

Now that we’ve seen what community outrage can do, we should turn our attention to the closed platforms of the iPhone and PSP. It’s a long shot but we can try!