Hi... welcome to PHPBuilder! Here's my opinion/suggestion/two-cents'-worth:
Square1 wrote:But TRYING TO LEARN VB.NET BY MYSELF HARD!!!!
I feel your pain. I'm working on some software right now that's using .NET/Microsoft's Visual C++/etc. etc. and... I'm drowning in a sea of MSDN reference pages. 🙁
Square1 wrote:Someone recommended I switch to PHP. It is pretty easy to learn and robust and will be around for some time to come. So here is my question....
It is indeed easy to learn. IMHO, it's very similar to C++. I also love how accessible and informative the PHP manual is.
Square1 wrote:Would using PHP on Windows with MSSQL be a poor choice? Meaning, would I regret not using MYSQL on a LINUX box? Switching to MYSQL may not be too bad with a converter but swtiching to LINUX would not be fun.
Is there a reason you jumped straight to Linux? Yes, PHP does have an older (possibly unmaintained and/or deprecated?) MSSQL library as well as a new [man]PDO[/man] library that can interface with MS SQL. Personally, however, I would prefer to use MySQL over MS SQL just based on my personal experience with MySQL and how easy it was to read the manual and/or get help with it.
That being said, one of the webservers I helped create (and still maintain) for my old high school runs Microsoft IIS (had to use ASP, which meant IIS, which meant no Apache 🙁) and MySQL on a Windows Server 2003 platform. There's nothing wrong with using Apache and MySQL on a Windows server if that's what you have now. However, do I think Linux/Unix/etc. distro's are more stable, solid, efficient operating systems than Windows? Yup. :p
Stoned1 wrote:t just seems that although you CAN use MS SQL with PHP, no applications I have found caters to PHP/MSSQL/Windows. They all seem to assume you are using PHP/MYSQL/Linux.
Other than the setup/installation progress, there's not much difference in interacting with MySQL via PHP on a Windows machine than on a Linux one. In fact, as far as MySQL itself goes, I can't think of any thing you would do differently on a Linux server than on a Windows server.
As far as the popularity of MySQL, I'm afraid it is indeed quite ubiquitous. I don't see MS SQL/ASP/etc. stuff much anymore, to be honest, unless it's some internal/proprietary application or something of that sort.
Stoned1 wrote:Is PHP/Windows/MSSQL a setup that I can use PHP applications with and have my site grow with?
If you are comfortable interacting with MS SQL, then go for it. PHP has the ability to interface with MS SQL servers, so the choice is yours to make. As I've said, however, you'll find that MySQL is nearly ubiquitous.
While some newer PHP applications might take advantage of database abstraction and libraries such as [man]PDO[/man], you might find that a lot of the information/script library available in the PHP world can be strongly centered around MySQL rather than MS SQL.
