Jul 2 2009

PHP hits the studio

I stumbled across what appears to be an excellent program / plugin; VS.php
It allows for the development, debugging and testing of php files within Visual Studio 2008!

Although it doesn’t have a visual designer, which might scare some people off, I’m a firm believer that visual web “designers” are a bad thing anyway :)
What it does have is an in-built version of Apache webserver, which takes away the pain of configuring Apache on your local machine to test your sites.
It also supports IIS 6 & 7 with FastCGI.

One of the newest features is the direct support for developing Silverlight 3 applications alongside your php scripts. This means you can have one project that contains both php and Silverlight 3 source files.

On top of that, it also has full intellisense built in!

The only downside is that this cool application isn’t free, but at only $99 and with a 30-day free trial, it’s not a huge expense and would probably be a great buy for anyone who uses Visual Studio a lot, but also writes scripts in PHP.

Check it out here: http://www.jcxsoftware.com/vs.php