I recently found an interesting Visual Studio plugin named VS.PHP. It allows you to write and debug PHP code using Visual Studio 2005 or 2008.

The home page of VS.PHP promises plenty of features like PHP 5 support, IntelliSense and debugging of PHP and JavaScript code. It was a surprise for me that all of those features really worked out of the box. I expected some hassling at least with debugger configuration but you can just create a new PHP project and hit F5. Especially the debugger integration has been implemented very well. All the common debugging features like local variables window, break points and call stack works.

Intellisense of VS.PHP seems not to work perfectly yet. Sometimes it does not find anything and sometimes it even gives variables and methods of wrong class. The stability of the plugin needs some improvement too since there was some random crashing but luckily crashes do not occur very often. It is also weird that on different computers VS.PHP wants to reorder the lines of the project file. This feature causes some extra conflicts when multiple developers are working on the same project using Subversion or some other version controlling software.

VS.PHP runs PHP pages using built-in Apache web server. For debugging it uses XDebug and DBG.

The plugin costs $99.99 per developer but there is 30-day free trial available. Regardless of some problems I got positive impression about the plugin. It allows me to develop PHP using the IDE which I am most familiar with.

Summary

• + Works out of the box
• + Offers familiar environment for .NET developers to write PHP code
• + Great debugging support for PHP and JavaScript
• - Some stability problems
• - Intellisense does not work very well