Some people have reported that the Php help documents don't show up in the Microsoft Document Explorere Help. Help2 is a bit fragile and sometimes the installer may fail to properly register the help.

There is a nifty tool that can help you diagnose what the problem is and often fix the problem. The tool is called FAR and can be found here.

This tool does a lot of things but the one thing you'd be probably interested is the Help2 tools. In it you can see all the help packages registered and if any has any problems. Often you can re-register the

As you may have noticed, we added a link to our partner Asial on our site. Asial is our Japanese partner and they are offering a Japanese version of VS.Php. I encourage to all our Japanese speaking customers to visit their site.

Asial is offering upgrades to our existing customers so please contact them for more details.

We have been using MakeMsi to build our installer since the beginning of VS.Php a few years ago. It has been working great for us and more importantly, the support Dennis offers is great through the yahoo groups site. I have no complains in that regard. As we work on international versions of VS.Php, we have been going through a bit of pain using MakeMsi, in particular with Japanese support.

I've been looking at Wix and it looks very promising. I'm going to try to get a Wix installer for the next release. I plan to remove a lot of complexity from the installer like selecting features and configuring file extensions. I figure most people don't care about changing the default settings for any of those things. The one thing I'll keep is the directory location.

I want to give a quick update on what's on the pipeline for VS.Php. The next release will include versions of VS.Php in Japanese and German. They will include all the Php intellisense content as well as the documentation. Pricing for those releases has not been finalized. The Japanese versions will be sold exclusively by our Japanese partner Asial. This 2.2 release will also include various bug fixes and minor enhancements. We are looking to release this later this month.

I put together a very simple tutorial that shows how to manage files between the solution explorer and the windows explorer. The key is to use the refresh and showall buttons in the solution explorer window. I hope you find this tutorial useful.

Managing files with solution explorer

Many have asked how to get debugging working with their existing Php setup. The first thing you need to do is download the DBG module from our download page. There is a version for Windows and a version for Linux.

Put the right version of the module in the ext directory. Then add the following to your php.ini file. This example is for Windows:

extension=php_dbg.dll

[DBG]
debugger.enabled = true
debugger.profiler_enabled = true
debugger.JIT_host = 127.0.0.1
debugger.JIT_port = 7869
debugger.enable_session_cookie = true

Once you do this, you need to restart your web server.

Hello VSPhp'ers!

My name is J. Rivera. I'm the product designer for VS.Php. This is my first post for the VS.Php blog. I indent to use this blog to keep you inform with the development news in VS.Php. I'm really excited about VS.Php and the new features comming in the next 6 months.

I also going to use this for posting answers to common questions users ask us every day. For instance, how do I get DBG to work? I remember when I first tried other Php IDE, I thought how frustrating it was to get debugging to work. The biggest pain point was that those IDEs didn't provide all the pieces you needed.