For me, coding in PHP has been a good news/bad news thing. The good news is that the language has a large development community, which brings to it a boat-load of tools and support sites. I also appreciate the existing applications and code base.

The bad news is that the actual writing of the code can get to be a chore. The PHP code-writing environments that I have used require a bit (sometimes a lot) of work to get up and running. Also, the "code assist" features in those tools are limited — not much more than auto-indentation and color coding to indicate keywords.

In short, none of the PHP IDEs that I have come across offer the power of the Visual Studio IDE to which I have become accustomed in my .NET coding activities. I always thought that it would be really cool if I could program in PHP under VS. Well, it seems that I can.

JCX Software promises that VS.PHP, its VS 2005 add-in, brings the power and versatility of the Visual Studio IDE to PHP coding. Among its advertised features are:

• Intelli-Sense support for keyword selection, function selection, and code completion.
• Code outlining
• Support for PhpDoc within the Visual Studio IDE
• The ability to debug server side PHP code and client side Javascript code in the same session
• Runs under the PHP4 or PHP5 run-time engine
• Automatic deployment

With a list like that, I was interested. I took VS.PHP for a spin. First, I did some small demo work to see if the product did all it claimed. Then I ported an existing PHP project into VS.PHP — one that I was working on anyway — to really take the product to task. In this article, I'll tell you how it all worked out.