Upgrading to VS.Php 2.8

I want to share a few hints and tips about VS.Php 2.8

Upgrade licenses

If you qualify for a free upgrade go to this page to request your free upgrade:

http://www.jcxsoftware.com/request_license.php

If you get back an older serial number (E.G. VS.Php 2.7), that means you no longer qualify for a free upgrade. This form always sends you the serial number for the latest version of VS.Php you qualify.

If you don't qualify for a free upgrade to 2.8, please purchase an upgrade license for $49.99. It comes with a year of free upgrades.

Also please remember that moving from vs2005 to vs2008 or vs2010 is not free, even if you are within your year of free updates. Moving versions of Visual Studio requires an upgrade license.

PHP 4

You will notice that VS.Php 2.8 no longer includes the PHP 4 runtime. You can still debug PHP 4 applications but you need to set up your own PHP 4 server with either XDebug or DBG. I highly recommend DBG for PHP4 applications.

PHP 5.3

VS.Php includes the new PHP 5.3 runtime. PHP 5.3 made a lot of changes to the php.ini file. That means if you are using a custom php.ini file in your project, it is most likely not going to work with VS.Php 2.8. Mysql functions will crash Apache. The best thing to do is to the following:

- Make a copy of your custom php.ini file
- Change the project settings to use the default php.ini
- Hit F5, this will create a copy of the php.ini in your project directory (hidden file)
- Point your project to use this php.ini file
- Merge the changes you made in your original custom php.ini file into the newly generated php.ini file

Deployment settings and other project settings

It is possible that once you upgrade to VS.Php 2.8 some of your project settings are gone. We apologize for this inconvenient. The good thing is that in VS.Php 2.8 you can take your solution file including the sou file and move it to another location and your settings will stay. This was a problem in 2.7.

Apache 2.2

If you are using a custom httpd config file you will have to do the same as with the php.ini file. The template has changed to use the Apahce 2.2 handler instead of the Apache 2 handler. This is a much simpler change. You could also see the httpd-template.conf file in the VS.Php directory and see the changes. There is only a few lines of code that have changed.

I hope these tips will help make your move to 2.8 easier. 2.8 is a vastly improve release from 2.7 with tons of bug fixes including a custom built XDebug engine that's more stable than the one you find at xdebug.org.

I hope you enjoy VS.Php 2.8 as much as I did developing it. I appreciate your support,

Juan