Struggling with an inexplicable issue

I was seeing some odd behavior in 1.19 alpha, so I decided to focus my attention on 1.18 instead, thereby increasing my confidence that my work would be against a known-good version of MediaWiki. Like 1.19 alpha, 1.18 is mostly working -- but here's a head scratcher. I'm getting strange rendering of some characters, such as the hyphen (-). Here's a page as seen in MediaWiki 1.18 on Windows 7, SQL Server 2008 R2, and IIS 7.0. Notice the messed up "Model-View-Controller" in the table of contents. The page was copied over from the English Wikipedia. Here's what's very strange. The SQL database has hyphens in it, nothing remarkable. When I select the "Edit" tab, I can see the hyphens in the text box, so I press preview. The result looks fine! The table of contents now shows "Model-View-Controller". Why is the rendering different between the preview and the rendered page? Except for the database access, the code is pretty much identical between the official 1.18 code and my variant.

1.19 alpha working on Windows

MediaWiki 1.19 alpha is up on Windows, with testing and perhaps modifications to come. Needs to use previous, rather than current version of the installer (as of NOLA Hackathon), but Max, who works on the installer, is aware of the problem, so I expect a newer version of the installer will work as well. Also, compression of values stored to the objectstore is disabled for this version, since I'm having problems when I compress and decompress those values.

SQL Server JumpIn Outcome

I had a great time at the Microsoft-hosted SQL Server JumpIn! camp. I got MediaWiki 1.16.5 to run on IIS 7 on Windows 7 with SQL Server 2008 R2, with SQL Server Denali, and with SQL Server Azure. I also got the engine mostly working on Windows Azure, deployed to the cloud, but need to flesh out a few missing pieces. First, sessions will have to be stored to the database, rather than to the file system. Second, the file-based media storage mechanism will have to be adapted to use blob storage. Also, I'll have to figure out how to get Java support so I can continue to use Apache Batik, and how I'll get that to work with cloud storage.

Like a Phoenix from the Ashes

This work is coming back to life. Next week, I'll be attending the Microsoft SQL Server JumpIn! camp, along with sixteen other PHP developers. I'll be devoting special attention to attempting to use the new Microsoft PDO for the SQL Server Direct driver. Mostly, it should be the same as it was when using the ADODB library, except I'll have a new Database class. Since I haven't kept things up to date, I'll have to keep my fingers crossed that I can get things up and running with MediaWiki 1.16.5 or 1.17. I've been pleased to discover, however, that while I was not looking the SQL syntax in tables.sql for MySQL has evolved to resemble what I had been doing for SQL Server much more closely than it used to. Also, I'll be targeting SQL Server 2008 R2 rather than SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server 2005.