Microsoft, the company that people love to hate just because it’s Microsoft, is often slammed because of its perceived closed and proprietary nature when it comes to its software. Even when they announced that they would be including support for Javascript in Visual Studio, their developer platform, not much was made of the news. The thing is that this inclusion of Javascript was only a part of a growing movement inside of the company to release code and software under their variation of the GPL license.

With the company’s move into the world of cloud computing with their Azure platform Microsoft has been adding additional support for other typically free development languages. In conjunction with their TechEd 2009 conference happening in Los Angeles TechEd India took the wraps off of the newest addition to 3rd party development languages.

At the TechEd show in India Microsoft removed the wraps off of a new software development kit (SDK) for those interested in developing PHP application for the Azure cloud platform. Additionally they let the world know that they are doing the same thing with development of an SDK for Java. Mary Jo Foley has the full scoop of the news on her blog

The PHP SDK for Windows Azure, known as PHPAzure, is an open source project, available for download from Microsoft CodePlex. The SDK “provides consistent programming model for Windows Azure Storage (Blobs, Tables & Queues), according to the CodePlex site.

On Microsoft’s Port 25 blog, Open Source Community Program Manager Peter Galli said Microsoft also is annoucing “the launch of a series of projects that offer samples and a toolkit that enable PHP developers to include Silverlight controls, Microsoft Virtual Earth maps and IE Webslices and Accelerators in PHP web applications; as well as automatically generated a simple “Create, Read, Update, Delete (CRUD)” PHP application from a table in SQL Server.”

As cool as this might be I am sure that the Microsoft haters out there will be coming out of the woodwork waving their Open Source flags and saying how bad this is for their movement.