For many years Microsoft development tools were costly and were difficult to obtain for your average budding student, the result was that languages like PHP took off with the result that we have hundreds of PHP applications around ( often written by senior students).
Microsoft processes have always been both professional and often questionalble, never the less for some years now they have been giving away free application development tools which a little over 10 years ago would have cost many hundreds if not thousands of pounds / dollars to buy
Today the happy union exists, where you can choose you language, choose you platform and (managing the bug fix list) you can develope on one and run on other, mix languages, mix servers and develop open source using the toolkit that best meets your skillset.
If you’re a PHP student yourself you might like to install a PHP application on IIS7 yourself.
You can do all that for free, details below
The most important thing you need to know if you are fairly new to the IIS world is that the
Microsoft Installer is the tool to prepare the IIS server for the PHP applications
If you're a PHP Geek ( try washing :) here's the PHP Geek reference
Install a PHP application on IIS 7 without the use of any deoderant
You might like to view the Configure mulitple sites on IIS7 page (link below) to see a few things about that happen beyound your domain.
See the
video on how to prepare IIS server ( version 7+) for any PHP Web Application.