We are posting this bug fix release to address a couple of issues including:

• Breakpoints been ignored on remote projects. This happened if the remote server was using virtual directories
• Added robustness in the debugger engine
• Fix various stability issues with the remote open dialog.
• Fix various issues with the website copy feature
• Add @method to the list in PhpDoc
• Enable registering custom extensions with VS.Php on VS2008

Today, we aligned the official release of VS.Php for Visual Studio 2008 with Microsoft's release of their trifecta of Windows 2008, Sql Server 2008 and importantly for us, Visual Studio 2008.

Microsoft is a great supporter of Php on Visual Studio. Brian Goldfarb, group product manager in the Developer Platform & Tools Team at Microsoft Corp said: "By utilizing the new features in Visual Studio 2008, PHP developers can build and deploy PHP applications faster and with a higher quality."

I'm glad to annouce we are releasing VS.Php for Visual Studio 2008 today. A few comments on this release and the upgrade process:

• If you have VS.Php 2005 and want to get a serial for 2008, you need to purchase an upgrade license. Except those who purchased VS.Php 2005 since last December.
• If you purchase VS.Php 2005 starting today, you are not elegible for a free upgrade edition to 2008.
• Upgrade purchases may take up to 24 hours to be processed. Please ensure you enter your previous order id to speed up the process.

Please note free upgrades from 2005 to 2008 apply only to customers who purchased VS.Php 2.4 for Visual Studio 2005 between Dec 3, 2007 and January 31, 2008.

If you purchased VS.Php 2.4 for Visual Studio 2005, you qualify for a free upgrade to VS.Php 2.4 for Visual Studio 2008. We are getting closed to release and we are now issuing serials for those customers interested in upgrading free. Please contact us with your order id and we will issue the new serial for you.

For those interested in trying out VS.Php 2.4 for Visual Studio 2008 check the beta page for the latest downloads:

http://www.jcxsoftware.com/jcx/vsphp/beta

We should be working out the issues in the next couple of weeks and releasing it by the end of January.

I realized a lot of people are interested in moving to Visual Studio 2008. Here is a sneak peak of VS.Php running inside Visual Studio 2008:

We are planning to make it available soon for beta testing!

The main two new features in VS.Php 2.4 are XDebug and drag-n-drop website copy. But there are also a couple of smaller features oriented to improve productivity as well.

After two years with the old Drupal table-based theme, we developed a new css-only theme and moved to Drupal 5.3.

I'm interested to know what do you think of the new website. Drop me a note with your feedback and comments.

For those who are familiar with Drupal, we based our template from the Zen theme. This theme is very easy to customize and a great starting point for new themes in Drupal.

I'm planning to change a bit the organization of the website later on, as you can see the structure is more or less the same as in the old website.

We added support for XDebug in the preview engine so you can use it right out of the box. When configuring your project you can select Xdebug or DBG. When the debug session starts, Apache will load Php with the configured debug engine.

XDebug has a lot more features than DBG and it is more stable in Php 5 so I recommend you using it instead of DBG.

As part of our move to XDebug we are adding new features that were not available in DBG.

The first one is support for the local variables watch window. XDebug has the ability to retrieve this list and we are adding support for it.

The second feature/bug fix is the ability to keep breakpoints working after you made modification in the code. Before those breakpoints needed to be reset. Right now the fix only applies to XDebug but we are going to try to fix it on DBG as well.

The next VS.Php 2.4 build will contain these changes.