

When the installation is finished, the project will open. PHP Tools will check your environment and install and configure PHP which is set up in the project: For this short tutorial, we can go with PHP 8.1 and select Finish.

That means developers will get IntelliSense, formatting, project system, on-the-fly code analysis, composer (PHP dependency management) integration and other advanced editor-related features for free. That allows PHP developers to work in Visual Studio and take advantage of all the great stuff which is available.

DEVSENSE is releasing a big part of their offering as a free extension, leaving some features as paid ones. Since its inception PHP Tools for Visual Studio was a paid extension, offering a free trial. A Prague-based company called DEVSENSE developed an extension called PHP Tools for Visual Studio which has been available in the Visual Studio ecosystem for over a decade. As time progressed more languages found their way to Visual Studio, like Python and eventually PHP. Visual Studio is a powerful IDE, but its focus didn’t align with some languages, PHP being one of them. It’s used in many frameworks and CSMs like WordPress, Laravel, Symfony, and others which are behind a sizable chunk of the Internet. PHP is one of the most popular programming languages for server-side web development.
