So as it's a new year, and this is a new blog, it's totally inappropriate that I start things off with a death announcement. In case you hadn't heard, PHP 4 is done, finished, kaput. And thank Zeus! Only one more major version to go until Magic Quotes are but a painful memory. Don't get me wrong… PHP 4 has kept me employed in various ventures over the last 7 years, but Magic Quotes are a pain in the ass if you don't know what you're doing, and I sure didn't for a long time. Seven years… oh, the memories. I remember the first PHP app I worked on, years ago, in the glorious dot-com summer days of 2001. It was a bulletin board (dare I name it? yes, of course) called vBulletin, and the damn thing didn't even have any indexes on its MySQL tables when I was tasked with fixing a particular installation at the little start-up I worked for at the time.

Anyhow, the PHP folk'll be dragging out security releases until the end of August '08, and after that you'll need to have your apps in shape. Check out the migration guide. There's so many compelling reasons to upgrade to PHP 5 that I won't even get into it here. The upgrade process is generally pretty painless, unless you happen to work at my current job where someone decided to change $this to a null reference in some of the key application classes.

Even though I'm the PHP guy of this two-bit operation, keep in mind that I actually like .Net, especially for non-web application programming, of which I've done practically none. One time I thought I might be applying for a .Net job though, so I started a small non-web project to get my hands dirty. I didn't get very far, but I did end up with a desktop app that did a good job of displaying a picture of a rather awesome cold baby seal. However, although I like .Net, I fear change, and I am solidly behind PHP as a web development tool.