Installing PHP on IIS 6 (Windows 2003)

We had a customer who was paying good money for a Dedicated Server of Windows 2003, and had his site hosted. We had to develop a newer version of the site on PHP/MySQL, and then consolidate both sites, the old one and new one. When we came to the stage of Consolidation, we needed a separate PHP enabled server, and that would have costed the customer, so on mutual understanding with customer we had to finally take this challenge of enabling PHP with Windows 2003 server IIS 6.0

I spent lot of time on browsing over the internet and knowing how to install PHP on IIS, and found good solutions, but none were actually working for me. So I hope my solution will be a very brief one, and would help somebody save lot of time.

What I prefer, and did, was as below:

1. Download Web Developer Suite
2. Install Web Developer Suite
3. Open the Web Developer Suite after installation, and click on Disable Startup for Apache. You should see the MySQL and IIS W3 as Running
4. Then you should be able to run the php files on your IIS wwwroot folder. However, if any error such as "Service Unavailable" or Page not able to be displayed occurs, then check the Application Pool if it is running or stopped. Also make sure you add .php extension from Home Directory, and select the file "php5isapi.dll". Also go to "Web services" and add a new web service as "PHP" and select the file php5isapi.dll from your php directory, and save.
   
5. You have PHP installed in few steps, Restart IIS, and you should have it working.

Hope it helps...