But times have changed. Both platforms are moving. PHP now has a whole bunch of application frameworks (Zend, CakePHP etc.) that encourage good application design and also since PHP 5, the programming language has improved a lot. On the other hand, with the release of ASP.NET MVC, it has become much more easy to render clean HTML and we can finally leverage all the cool client-side toolkits that are out there without having to work around the quirks of Web Forms. 

So, with this movement, we see that both platforms grow towards each other. More and more developers come to have a look over the fence to see what’s happening at the neighbours place.

Two concrete examples:

• I’m consulting a little at a PHP shop that is moving towards .NET. They found Visual Studio and C# very cool, but the Web Forms issues regarding clean HTML etc. made it an absolute no-go. ASP.NET MVC is what made them switch.
• Just watched the ASP.NET MVC Mix 09 presentation of Rob Conery (Microsoft) and he showed lots of things that were clearly inspired by how PHP apps like WordPress work.

I like this movement! As a .NET developer, I find it very refreshing and inspiring to mix and mingle with ‘the other side’. There is a lot we can learn from each other to make better web applications.

Since the server is running IIS6 and not the usual LAMP stack, I was prepared for some struggling, but it was pretty easy.

I started with installing the IIS FastCGI extension, PHP 5.2.8 and MySQL 5.1.30. After that, I only had to install WordPress and things were ready to roll.

For pretty extensionless urls, I found the Ionics Isapi Rewrite Filter that also redirects the old SubText url’s to the new pretty ones.

The most challenging part was migrating the old posts from SubText to WordPress, but luckily, I wasn’t the first one who attempted this.

Please leave a comment if something is broken, or when you find links that point to the old blog.