Native PHP support in Visual Studio 2010?

Question

Is there any truth to the rumor that Visual Studio 2010 will natively support PHP coding?

(http://www.codeplex.com/php4vs)

If not,what are the options?(exce

Answer 1

Check out CodeLobster php, it's free and has a very similar look and feel to visual studio plus it has IntelliSense and debugging support.

Answer 2

Visual Studio has various types of support for PHP through the links, tools, and projects listed here but not "native" support (meaning install just Visual Studio and be able to create PHP projectsa and websites).

WebMatrix, another Microsoft product (free) does have native support. You can install it via the Web Platform Installer and immediately start building PHP sites from scratch or install various PHP 3rd party solutions like WordPress, Drupal, etc.

WebMatrix also has pretty good support for MySQL (via the MySQL->Net connector, installable through the web platform installer, just search for MySQL in the Web PI tool). You cannot create new databases from within WebMatrix but you can create and edit tables and data once the database is created (just create the database through the mysql.exe command line).

Answer 3

I would recommend PHP Tools for Visual Studio - new PHP integration for VS2010 and VS11.

• syntax highlighting
• IntelliSense (tooltip, function assist, code completion, go to definition,...)
• code navigation
• custom file extensions
• integrated documentation

Its basic features are free, it is fast and stable (preferred for me)

Answer 4

phpDesigner7 was the best solution for PHP

Answer 5

There is PHP Language Support, created by Sam Harwell. It has basic editing features for the PHP scripting language.

According to it's Visual Studio Gallery page, current editing features include:

• Syntax highlighting, including support for HTML code outside PHP tags and within documentation comments
• Outlining support for quickly collapsing classes and functions
• Dropdown bars listing classes and functions within the current document This extension has a relatively small feature set, but it's quite fast and usable. It was created as part of an experiment to provide editor features for multiple languages within a single document (PHP, HTML, and formatted documentation comments).

Answer 6

One of my projects has over 30,000 files, that includes however images and other items, in total about 12,000 php and js scripts, VS.php looked at it and barfed. Back to netbeans for now. Netbeans is amazing in what it does including the js support but I HATE java based apps. They are way too slow and fat.