A word from our sponsor: Microsoft!

As a sponsor of WordCamp Montreal 2011 (remember the yummy ice cream Saturday afternoon?), Microsoft WebMatrix provides you a simple and lightweight IDE to work with HTML, PHP, WordPress and a lot more Web applications with a one-click install. With an integrated web server, SQL server and with an easy way to deploy locally a WordPress instance in less than 10 minutes and a couple of clicks, WebMatrix is more than an IDE, it’s a complete tool for Web Developers that want to empower their work.

In addition to providing you an awesome tool, we also work with the community to help you work more efficiently with WordPress and your server on the Cloud or on premise. Here is an example with one of the most-used cache plugin for WordPress, W3Total Cache.

The latest release of W3 Total Cache, the site performance framework for WordPress, now supports the entire Microsoft stack including: IIS Support, Azure Storage Support for Content Delivery, MS SQL and SQL Azure Server Support and also makes WordPress compatible with Azure Cloud Hosting.

IIS Support: W3 Total Cache increases the reliability of WordPress deploys on Windows, it’s no longer necessary to deploy Apache or Nginx on Windows, the power of IIS and it’s modules can be fully leverage directly in IIS with the Microsoft Web Platform Installer.

Microsoft SQL / SQL Azure Support: Until now MySQL was the standard database backend for WordPress, now with W3 Total Cache not only are the powerful Microsoft SQL Server or Scalable SQL Azure backends available, but the power of W3 Total Cache’s database caching provides even more scale to the robust capability of MS SQL.

Azure Storage Integration: Whether using the Azure cloud hosting or not, leverage Microsoft’s network to improve user experience on your WordPress site by enabling Azure Storage as a Content Delivery Network (CDN) method. The integration is transparent and seamless once settings are populated and your media is uploaded to the cloud using the simple export tools.

Azure Cloud Hosting Compatibility: Deploy WordPress directly into the Azure cloud and benefit from complete control of the application performance using the Azure cloud hosting platform and W3 Total Cache’s fine-tuned controls for WordPress and Browser Caching.

Interoperability is the keyword in this new release and Frederick Townes, the CTO Mashable.com understood it: “Adding support of Microsoft technologies to WordPress is vital to increase the reach of the tens of thousands of plugins and themes that exist in the ecosystem. WordPress has clearly established itself as the leading publishing platform and W3Total Cache has made it a great experience on Microsoft platforms.”

We hope you had as great a weekend of WordPress awesomeness as we did. If you have any questions about WordPress and the Microsoft stack, please feel free to connect with Frederic Harper at fredh@microsoft.com. See you at the next edition.