A few weeks ago, someone asked if anyone had any experience with VS.PHP, which is a PHP plug-in for Visual Studio.
I've been doing all my development with TextPad and figured it was time to change to an IDE, so I could be more productive. In case anyone is still wondering... I downloaded a trial version of VS.PHP and gave it a whirl... In order to run the application, you need to have Visual Studio installed, with VS 2005 being preferred. I got a free copy at a Microsoft thing a year or 2 ago, so that helped. VS is a little pricy, although I understand that is can be run with limited functionality under the Express Edition, which is free. By no means did I try all the features, but in the short time I used it I made the following observations... 1. It seems to require you to store all of the files in a directory several below your My Documents folder. It does have the ability to deploy to another folder, local or remote, but I like to code, save and refresh my browser, without having to click my way through to the deploy option. 2. Debugging was OK, better than what I had (nothing) but nothing spectacular 3. Intellisense for PHP was OK, and excellent for HTML (But do you really need it for HTML?) 4. As someone who cut their coding teeth on Visual Basic, the interface was fairly easy to learn. 5. Updates to the software are frequent and install very quickly. I am sure that over time this will improve into a very viable IDE for PHP developers. With that all said, I downloaded the Zend Studio on Friday as a comparison, and within 10 minutes think I would rather splash out on the Zend IDE in lieu of the VS.PHP one. Especially since the base package is the same price ($99) for both of them. That's my two cents, for what it's worth. _______________________________________________ UPHPU mailing list [email protected] http://uphpu.org/mailman/listinfo/uphpu IRC: #uphpu on irc.freenode.net
