I've been programming with PHP for many years and have used a lot of editors and so-called IDEs, I must admit that PHP IDEs have become much better now and they differ significantly from simple editors with syntax highlighting. Anyway, in the recent time I have been working much with Visual Studio. I must confess that I really love it, some people may argue of course, especially Java developers who are fond of their development tools and tend to look down at other ones. So, I was happy to learn that there is a plug-in that enables you to program with PHP in a familiar development environment of Visual Studio. Sure, I doubt that it will interest people who don't have Visual Studio, but for developer who are used to it, it's a great choice, I think.
It offers solution and project management, IntelliSense, built-in Apache and PHP (you can work with an external server as well), DBG and xDebug debuggers I especially love its debugging features because I deal with the Visual Studio debugger that I love very much. I suppose VS lovers are going to appreciate this feature.
So, if you are a programmer who use Visual Studio and love it and have to use PHP as well, then I think you should give VS.PHP (yeah, that's how it is called) a try. It's available for both Visual Studio 2005 and 2008. There is a 30 days trial. While the full version costs only $99.99 that is not that much comparing to other PHP IDEs, like Zend Studio or NuSphere PHPEd.
I almost forgot to mention, it has built-in Zend Framework as well :-)!
The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way. My personal thoughts tend to change, hence the articles in this blog might not provide an accurate reflection of my present standpoint.
© Mike Borozdin