The main two new features in VS.Php 2.4 are XDebug and drag-n-drop website copy. But there are also a couple of smaller features oriented to improve productivity as well.
XDebug
With XDebug you can do pretty much everything you could with DBG but with certain advantages. First, XDebug works much better in Php 5. XDebug also add support for exception handling and those are handled with Visual Studio debugger exception handling functionality. Another feature on XDebug is the support for local variables watch window. Local variables watch window can be accessed from the debug->windows menu.
Website copy
Often times, the server has files that you don't have locally. Up to this point, the deployment module would let you push your files to the server but you didn't have the ability to download new files from the server. With the website copy feature, you get a view of what's on the server and on the client. You can then drag files from either side. This gives you great flexibility on top of the existing deployment module.
Improving productivity
The goal of the IDE is to make the developer more productive. We look for those little things we can add to make your life easier. Two new things we added are completion of phpdoc comments and completion of html attributes. Let's give you an example to better illustrate the new features.
If you have a PhpDoc comment like this:
/** * My comment
And you press enter in the last line, you'll get a new * added automatically. It will look like this:
/** * My comment *
The html attribute completion feature works like this. If you type/select an html attribute with intellisense the editor will add the ="" to the end of the attribute and place the cursor in between the quotes. A small thing that can same time.
Please let me know what do you think of the new features.
