Enable PHP highlights in VS 2010 ?

Question

I've heard that Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 has support for PHP. When I load a PHP file though, it has nothing highlighted and is nothing more than a glorified text editor.

Is there a way to enable it?

Answer 1

I've heard rumors about them adding it in the final release, however there is no native support for PHP within the beta right now.

Answer 2

As far as I know, we don't do PHP support out of the box. You probably need a third-party component such as this one: http://www.jcxsoftware.com/vs.php

Answer 3

On Microsoft Connect, it seems that this is a feature request. And they've talked about it on MSDN. But so far, syntax highlighting doesn't seem to be a builtin feature just yet. Though, Expression Web 2 and 3 do have IntelliSense in the HTML designer, we could be seeing native syntax highlighting in the Visual Studio 2010 RTM come March.

Hope this helps.

Answer 4

You can enable syntax highlighting for php files using a simple hack in Visual Studio 2010 (might also work for earlier versions)

Open Tools -> Options dialog from the menu, and select Text Editor -> File Associations on the left. Add php as a new extension and select 'Microsoft Visual C++' in the adjacent combo box. Apply and now you and open and edit any php file in Visual Studio with Syntax highlighting and code folding. The only problem come is when the file has mixed php and html code. It does not look really good and editing is painful.

I have tried VS.php, and I am certainly not impressed. The only thing it can add to visual studio is creating a php project easily, otherwise, I haven't been able to find it any more useful.

Answer 5

I've found by using the VS2010 script editor for PHP it does 90% of what I wanted.

As Samnan states - goto Open Tools -> Options dialog from the menu, and select Text Editor -> File Associations and told VS2010 to use its script editor

Also XRefresh plugin for firefox is quite handy for quickly viewing code changes on a second monitor running firefox.