Thanks for the quick reply sledger. I wonder if Xara can be configured to pass the web page to the local host during a preview, so it feels more or less transparent to the developer (same Xara workflow)?

Following up a step further, if you or anyone else can weigh in:

It appears that my version of Win 7 x64 includes full IIS. After looking at the options in the control panel, there are a multitude of things that can be enabled separately. I have no clue what the minimum config needed to preview php enabled pages is. Any ideas anyone?