Is it possible to enable Visual Studio to switch to design view for PHP documents like it does with ASP.NET documents? Maybe even populate the toolbox with PHP snippets.

ebinfo says:

Right this second, no. But i think it's in the works for a future version.

JoeBobSmith says:

Cool, it's the only thing keeping me from switching to VS + VS.php as my primary IDE for PHP. When will this new feature be available, and will it be available for VS2005?

ebinfo says:

i am not sure of when this will be available, but as of each features being added, my guess is that it would be available for 2005 as well. As so far all features that i know of were added for 2002, 2003 and 2005 (though 2005 is beta and considered unstable due to the fact that microsoft can change the way it behaves since it's in beta).

Let me know if it this helps.

JoeBobSmith says:

Yea, I was just wondering if it's something I should expect anytime soon.

juanc says:

We would like to have this feature before the end of the year. Ideally in sync with theVS 2005 release.

JemAs007 says:

Any updates as to when this feature is going to be added to the product?

juanc says:

We are looking at the new interfaces exposed by VS.Net 2005. We'll keep you posted.

gabbeauchamp says:

I downloaded the trial version of vs.php 2005 and there is still no design view for php file?!?

Will we have to wait long before this feature becomes available. It is very useful... A must!!!

Thanks

juanc says:

I hope this feature makes it into the product this year.

lew says:

I am sure others have thought of this work around, but simply renaming the file extension .html to get to the design mode and then back to .php for debug works. Rather clumsey, but if you have a fair amount of html design work to do, then worth-it for WSIWIG.

saleem_2004ji says:

Hope Design view to be integrated very soon as it is still not there in new version 2.1

iznevidelitsa says:

This is still not a great work around, but it may be a little easier. Open the file normally when you want to edit php, then close it (otherwise the designer breaks and you have to restart VS) and right click on the file and Open With.. HTML Editor.

This gives you design view and html intellisense, but you loose php intellisense.

There hasn't been activity on this for awhile, so if there is an actual solution, someone please let me know.

juanc says:

We have been discussing with Microsoft about making the Html designer extensible for Php. Maybe for VS10...