Full PHP/Drupal Debugging with Visual Studio

I haven't heard of/tried Phalanger, but I'll certainly give it a whirl.

I'm sort of put back by this: http://drupal.org/node/165399. Having developed with Microsoft tools for most of my career, I'm a bit put off by the concept of patching in order to just get things to load. Free is a good price, but a hundred bucks for VS.PHP was a pretty good investment just to get up and running in a couple minutes.

I have some questions on Phalanger if anyone has answers.

1. Does Intellisense work for modules? I've seen editors where some sort of auto-completion works, but only for the PHP language itself. VS.NET reads included files and tries to figure out (although it's not 100% like reflection-based .NET) what the methods and properties are.
2. The project page for Phalanger says that it interoperates with .NET. VS.PHP does this, as well, but I have no use for that. My Drupal installation will be running on LAMP, so CIL and .NET interoperability have no interest to me.
3. Does Phalanger have breakpoints, step-debugging, and variable inspection as part of the development experience?

I suppose I will find out some of the answers to these questions if I get a chance to try out the program. I'm satisfied with VS.PHP for now, and I need to get a couple sites out the door. But I'm writing a book on Drupal integration, and I'm sure my readers would be interested in the free price point!

Here's my quick and dirty. I tried with several combinations of OS, VS, and VS.PHP, and here's what works the best for me:

* Windows XP SP3 running under VirtualPC 2007
* Visual Studio 2008
* VS.PHP 2.7
* WampServer 2.0 with the PHP 5.2 add-in.

I tried VS.PHP 2.8 but it does not support PHP 5.2, only PHP 5.3. The developer apparently did a lot of work on the XDebug module and it is not downward compatible to PHP 5.2

So if you are using Drupal 6, you need PHP 5.2, regardless of what people say about Drupal 6 running under PHP 5.3.

VS.PHP has its own version of Apache that is invoked like IIS is when F5 is pressed in Visual Studio. It also has its own PHP. I use WampServer for MySQL, but I also use Wamp's Apache on port 80 so I can run the site without the overhead of debugging.

The trick in this situation is to make sure the httpd.conf and php.ini of both environments are in sync.

So here's the process I used:

* Load Drupal 6 under c:\wamp\www\drupal6
* Start VS.PHP
* File...New PHP Project from Existing Code
* Identify c:\wamp\www\drupal6
* Set a breakpoint somewhere (I put one in index.php)
* F5

It'll start its web server at some random port and load the browser (probably whatever version of IE you have loaded) and break at the breakpoint. You can change it from Internet Explorer to Default Browser if you want some other browser. (Project...Properties...Debug).

So that's about it. I'm very happy with the configuration. Sometimes the VS.PHP built-in Apache server conks out and re-starts, but it really is a useable development system.

Oh, I did the same thing with Drupal 7 and it worked perfectly.

I've seen this and actually mention it in a chapter I did for another Drupal book, The Definitive Guide to Drupal 7.

There are two probable reasons for this. One is that you don't have your MySQL server running. The other is that, for some reason, you need to comment out the line that includes "Order allow,deny" at the to of the .htaccess file in your Drupal directory.

Protect files and directories from prying eyes.

Order allow,deny

Hi brian.travis ,
I just got your book and its really a nice boook for dot net developer who want to learn drupal in visual studio . i tried to open the drupal project with visula sutdio and its working fine after commenting the line as you told above "Order allow,deny" , i was using the built in appahce server in vs.php,

but i have wamp server and i want to use my drupal code using wamp server but I am not be able to do it ,even i was not be able to use simple php project using vs.php when i have wamp server , i also tired to contact the vs.php forum but no use.
you can check my post from there too.
http://www.jcxsoftware.com/jcx/node/3351

and when i tried to load the drupal project in vs.php using wamp i got internal error , there is a related post on this url but still no fruit.
http://www.jcxsoftware.com/jcx/node/3347
can you please tell me how to do and degbugg drupal project when using wamp server in vs.php ?

Hi Brian,

I am having problem debugging drupal. For other php project it is working good and I can debug exactly as .net project but when I try to debug drupal project, it hits the breakpoint but when I press F5, F10 or F11, Apache HTTP crashes and debugging session terminates with message:
Apache HTTP Server has stopped working

A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Please close the program.

Please help me how to resolve this issue? I tried commenting Order allow, deny without success.

Thanks.

I like this style. We just try to resolve application feature ,no to make new problem.

My rule is : debugable must before develop.
Debug and visual is two real technology of our computer technology.
Any technology which to make me understand faster is good.

Beside , maybe the author is in a same condition with me that have to act several different roles by himself~

I admire those who single-mide in drupal. But I cannot~~