Creating a PHP 5 Extension with Visual C++ 2005

This article describes the steps to create a custom PHP extension DLL for the Windows platform. The Zend API documentation that comes with PHP 5 on Windows (see php_manual_en.chm) does a good job explaining how to write extension methods, parse method parameters, and return values. But there is not currently a good step-by-step tutorial on how to get your first extension project up and running on Windows. The aim of this article is to fill that gap.