Ruslan Yakushev (Microsoftie extraordinaire and personal friend) has announced the release of  WinCache released version 1.1 Beta. For those not familiar with the project, WinCache is an opcode cache like APC, but for use with IIS/PHP on Windows. WinCache, which was initially released last year, is an official Microsoft project and part of their ongoing effort to make PHP a first class citizen on Windows.

There is no doubt that WinCache does speed up PHP performance on Windows—this author performed a preliminary review of WinCache 1.0 and, later on, Dutch consulting firm Ibuildings released a more extensive WinCache analysis. Both those posts show significant performance gains and an overall favourable impression from the reviewers.

Not satisfied with just being faster, Ruslan has been working on WinCache since it’s initial release and now has 1.1 ready to everyone test. This latest version introduces two important new features to the mix: user cache API’s and the WinCache session handler.

With the addition of these two features (described in more detail in Ruslan’s announcement) WinCache is becoming a serious tool for anyone deploying PHP applications on Windows.

The new extension can be downloaded from the official IIS site, while its source code is available directly from PECL. Microsoft also maintains the WinCache Community Forums, where you can learn more about WinCache and talk to users deploying it.