PHP development in VS

does anyone do php development in vs? i have a xampp + wordpress install i want to dig into but would like to hear of any suggesstions for ide, workflow, horror stories, etc... 

I do a lot of PHP dev in VS, I use the VS.php add-in. Being a student means I get it on the cheap.

It's good and competent for a PHP IDE (for example, it has a proper intellisense engine, as opposed to simpler IDEs that don't intelligently analyse PHP source), it also has support for common PHP templating engines like Smarty (but I've never used them myself).

VS.php works great with VS2005/2008, but there are issues with 2010 (for example, there's no IDE-based documentation support, but that's Microsoft's fault). It comes with a built-in Apache server with debugging setup.

There are areas where it falls behind VS's support for ASP.NET, such as the lack of a Design View (which you shouldn't be using anyway ), but there are also a few niggles, such as it using its own text colour settings (rather than using the existing "Comment/Keyword/etc" entries. Also it sounds the system beep sound whenever the intellisense popup appears.

While I'd love to have VS.php, the price is far too high for me. £64.99, plus £32.99 every two years. Ouch! It might be very reasonable - but not for me and my level of usage unfortunately. I'll stick with Notepad++ etc.

I understand you were asking about VS, but when i played with PHP, I used aptana, an eclipse-based ide. Among the many features, its killer feature for me was ssh/sftp support (which BTW is now built in into eclipse). If you use one of the many PHP hosters, like dreamhost, you better use sftp then ftp.

Have you tried WebMatrix?

I suggest to try free PHP IDE Codelobster PHP Edition - http://www.codelobster.com It has VS-style interface.