Visual Studio 2010 CTP has been available for some time already. So, I guess many of you have already used a chance to give a new version of the famous IDE a try. If you haven’t downloaded it, well I think it’s quite sensible thing to get it. It’s likely to be released at the end of the next year, so you will have a plenty of time to learn all the new features and become a real guru of .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010.

Anyway, the current CTP is shipped as a Virtual PC image that means you cannot expect it run ultra fast. Moreover, the Virtual PC image is packaged with a lot of things that you may need when experiencing the new IDE, I mean they included Team Foundation Server, SQL Server 2008 Enterprise, Office 2007 and Windows Sharepoint Services that are running by default. Wow, that’s a lot and it consumes a lot of memory. But sometimes you don’t need those things at all, for instance, you just want to learn the new features of C# 4.0. Thus, it’s sensible to get rid of unnecessary services, you can always enable them later. So, go to Start –> Administrative Tools –> Services and simply stop and disable automatic running of the services you don’t need.

Personally, I disabled TFS, SQL Server, WSS, IIS, Tablet Input services. Eventually the memory consumption of my virtual machine dropped from about 1 GB to less than 500 MBs.

I've been programming with PHP for many years and have used a lot of editors and so-called IDEs, I must admit that PHP IDEs have become much better now and they differ significantly from simple editors with syntax highlighting. Anyway, in the recent time I have been working much with Visual Studio. I must confess that I really love it, some people may argue of course, especially Java developers who are fond of their development tools and tend to look down at other ones. So, I was happy to learn that there is a plug-in that enables you to program with PHP in a familiar development environment of Visual Studio. Sure, I doubt that it will interest people who don't have Visual Studio, but for developer who are used to it, it's a great choice, I think.

It offers solution and project management, IntelliSense, built-in Apache and PHP (you can work with an external server as well), DBG and xDebug debuggers I especially love its debugging features because I deal with the Visual Studio debugger that I love very much. I suppose VS lovers are going to appreciate this feature.

So, if you are a programmer who use Visual Studio and love it and have to use PHP as well, then I think you should give VS.PHP (yeah, that's how it is called) a try. It's available for both Visual Studio 2005 and 2008. There is a 30 days trial. While the full version costs only $99.99 that is not that much comparing to other PHP IDEs, like Zend Studio or NuSphere PHPEd.

I almost forgot to mention, it has built-in Zend Framework as well :-)!

I was badly surprised today, when Visual Studio 2008 SP1 suddenly quit while loading the "Choose Toolbox Items" dialog. After some Googling I learnt that such things were caused by PowerCommands, thanks to the guys here. However, the workaround is pretty simply, you just have to re-install PowerCommands. After that procedure Visual Studio starts working properly again.