First impressions

[BladeMF]

Hi there,

I am a long-year user of VS.PHP an was begging to get annoyed with the product and decided to try yours. Here are my first impressions:

1. I love the Intellisense. I have HUGE projects (4000+) files and VS.PHP never picked all of them properly. Man, this is a relief!!!
2. It loads really fast.
3. Handles #region in cyrilic.
4. Has perfect intellisense.
5. Did I mention the intellisense?

But! There are things missing that are important to me:

IMPORTANT:
1. PHP Doc @property support. Crucial!
2. PHP Doc @var inline, or any sort of type hinting. If I have a variable whose type cannot be inferred, I must be able to "declare" it. VS.Php has this support, and I don't imagine it is a great deal of work to implement.
3. Normal PHP projects, instead of websites with include/exclude from project support, as well as "display excluded files". I have folders full lots and lots (thousands) of non-php files, which I don't want you to even try to parse.

NICE TO HAVE:
1. The tooltip over a variable or property to show its inferred type.
2. Full coloring support. Most notably: operators and numbers
3. Collapsing/outlining of /**/ comments.
4. PHP Doc comment over functions to display the short summary instead of /** summary */
5. Intellisense of the functions (Ctrl+Space) to show the return type and comment, if any.
4. Maybe you can cache the intellisense info on project close so it doesn't read all of it on load and can be forced to do so. I am not entirely sure, because it currently reads them all in about 20 seconds, which is not that long and it is real-time, but maybe you should think about it. My projects are located on a shared drive and I have not tried how fast will you parse the from that drive, but I bet won't be fast. Currently I am using hard links on the hard drive, but that has some downsides.

That's what I have for now. I promise you - if you keep up the good work, improve and most importantly - fix your bugs, you'll have a loyal fan.

[BladeMF]

Also, there's a bug in the intellisense:

This works fine:
$PaymentDates= new CInboundPaymentDateCollection("", null, 1, -1);

This does not:
$PaymentDates= new CInboundPaymentDateCollection("
", null, 1, -1);

Ctrl+Space does not work there.

[Miloslav Beno]

Hi BladeMF,

Wow, thank you for writing us this great feedback! We are really glad you like our IntelliSense.

About missing things:
1. PHP Doc @property support. Crucial! - already done, we just have to release it
2. Good idea, will be done!
3. PHP Projects are in private beta with debugging right now

Nice to have:
1. Yes, I've put it on dev plan
2. We support numbers, but not operators. We'll be done
3. Yes
4. We can probably do this as an option, so everyone can choose what prefers
5. We show comments, not the return type. That' probably nice to have
6. That's prepared. We just need to release it

I think most of your suggestions can be done very fast. Anyway if you'd see something you'd like to have here please give us know.

About the bug in IntelliSense, could you please specify where is the mouse cursor when you press Ctrl+Space? What would be expected behaviour? (Maybe it's fixed in the current development version as I'm not able to reproduce it)

[BladeMF]

It does not matter where I put the cursor, it doesn't work anywhere. If you cannot reproduce it, most probably you've fixed it.

How can I participate in the beta program?

[BladeMF]

Forgot to mention. It will be really nice to have the option to force the encoding of the files in a project - it is really hard to find the one file in windows-1251 in a 4000+ files, which are supposed to be UTF-8 with no signature.

[Miloslav Beno]

So most likely it's fixed, you could try it in beta. I'll give you permissions to access private thread here in discussion to access beta versions.

About encoding for projects, there was this request before so it's going up on the dev list.

[BladeMF]

Where/when can I see this beta thread?

[Miloslav Beno]

There is going to be an update of beta, once it's out you'll have acess to it. I'll notify you by email with details.

[BladeMF]

By the way - the javascrpt code folding was an unexpected pleasure

I really like how responsive the plugin is. I mean, you blow VS.Php clear out of the water on this point alone. A while ago I was so upset with the performance/broken intellisense of VS.Php that I actually installed Zend! It was similar or worse, but had working intellisense (or so it seemed). I had given up on waiting someone to develop something fast.

I presume that since this forum has only 2 pages of topics, this plugin is new. I am really impressed where it is in terms of features. I mean REALLY. But you should consider making your plugin page in VS gallery more representative of the real virtues of your application. I looked at it once before and I thought that it was way too behind on features. Thankfuly (for me) I returned and saw that guy who posted that he threw VS.Php out of the window and that convinced me. You need to convince all those PHP developers who develop other things on VS that you have THE C# FEEL ON PHP CODE and then brace yourselves for the tide

VS.Php is losing customers because of poor service and poor quality. As long as you don't make the same mistake, you will clearly be in the lead. I really can't see ANY PHP IDE that will be better than VS with PHP Tools after a couple of months worth of new features - the performance/responsivness and the intellisense quality is just mind-blowing. I guess you really know your shit, writing compiler for PHP to IL (I presume) and all.

Cheers! You really made my week!

[Miloslav Beno]

Hello,

Thank you for this great post, you can't imagine how happy opinion like this make us! It also motivates us even more than we are...

The plugin is quite new, but it benefits greatly from our PHP compiler knowledge. We undestand that there are crucial features that need to be released as debugger, but that one is basicaly done. There is just testing going on and fidling around with details.

About VS gallery, I think you are right and it needs to be changed. We will give it more attention after releasing our big release with projects and debugger.

Thank you,