DevSense makes a nice PHP extension for Visual Studio (http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/8292e47d-8ed2-...). It's not free, but it's inexpensive.

On a related note, DevSense has also taken over development the Phalanger project (a PHP compiler/runtime for .NET). It's Apache 2.0-licensed and on GitHub if you're interested: https://github.com/DEVSENSE/Phalanger

DevSense does provide some free tools for VS if you're using Phalanger, maybe they'd be good enough for what you want: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/419916fb-ec89-...

I've had decent results with the PHP Tools extension: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/8292e47d-8ed2-....

There is also the VS.Php extension, but it's not free, and seems a little less polished.

Thanks so much for the reply. I will take a look!

I know you weren't asking for other IDE recommendations, but I thought I'd give you perspective from someone who is almost exclusively a VS user and loves the IDE (well, up to VS2010, or VS2012 with 2010 colors and icons).

When it comes to the occasional PHP project, I just use an IDE geared toward PHP development. Admittedly, it has been a while, but when I tried using PHP extensions for VS in the past, debugging, unit tests, etc... all seemed to require a ton of effort or didn't quite work the way I wanted them to. I would have loved to use VS for all development, but in this case, I felt like the tool was too weighty and not quite compatible.

In my particular case, I use Netbeans because it is free, lightweight, and it just works. My projects are more portable to other non-VS developers and adding PHPDocs and PHPUnit support was really easy. I'm sure there are other good IDEs as well.

Try Webmatrix also, it has PHP intellisense and is a really nice little PHP IDE.