VS.Php 3.0 for Visual Studio includes a large number of improvements and new features.

New intellisense engine

The highlight of this release is the new intellisense engine that provides a much richer experience when working with complex PHP projects. The new intellisense engine improves support for finding classes, functions and constants defined in the project. Also much improved support for namespaces including namespace aliases. Finally, the new intellisense engine gives you information about how it is finding the symbols you are looking for. A new output view is available to see the intellisense messages:

We also improve the ability to access variables defined in other files as long as those files are explicitly included in the file you are working on.

Configurable root directory

In previous versions of VS.Php, the root of the application was the root of the project. Often times, frameworks used a different folder as the root of the application. You can now select any folder in the project as the root of the folder.

Improved Zend Framework integration

In VS.Php 3.0, you now have easy access to the zend framework command tool to make updates to your project:

We also use the zend framework tool to generate the project structure.

Sympfony Project Template

Now included is also a template for Symfony projects. With the improved intellisense support, VS.Php offers a rich intellisense experience with Symfony projects including the use of namespaces.

Improved debugging

With the new version of XDebug, VS.Php provides a much more robust debugging experience. In particular when evaluating invalid expressions where in the past, it would stop your debugging session.

Other enhancements

• Add property page to configure the highlighting settings available in the PHP editor.

  

• New trial UI that let's you activate while running as administrator so activation will stick on the system.
• PHP tags are now colored separately:

  

• Adding PDO driver for MS Sql server
• Automatically configure timezone in php.ini templates
• Add timeout feature to prevent infinite searches. Timeout is 2 seconds.
• Add @var type linking support when specifying a var name. The comment can be before or right after the first use of the variable.
• Set the xdebug var parameters in the ini file rather than in code. This allows you to modify their values as you wish.
• Intellisense is aware of aliases defined by calls to class_alias
• Update to PHP 5.3.10 using VC9. Include a VC9 version of Apache and use this for hosting PHP 5.3.
• Register .module file extension as a core PHP file extension to improve Drupal support.
• When deleting a file or folder, put it in the recycle bin.
• __NAMESPACE__ is now available via intellisense
• Update to Zend Framework 1.11

Other bug fixes

• Fix issue to ensure SCC allows us to delete file.. Checking in the wrong place.
• Fix issue with shortcut no longer being advertised.
• Clean up formatting.
• Fix smart indentation in VS2010 when using spaces.
• Register simplexml as a core module
• Allow <? blocks inside HTML attributes.
• On the module info, don't include defines for hex numbers
• Allow to unset the php.ini property.
• Update web.config template to include default page: index.php
• Fix a number of scenarios that were reporting syntax errors but the code was actually valid PHP
• When creating a large project from template like Symfony, show a progress bar.
• Fix instanceof bug where we now assign the variable the type defined in this statement.