I need to develop a PHP application and as I am not familiar with PHP and I am working on a windows environment, I need to setup a development system. I develop normally using Visual Studio and I did some ASP.Net development so I am familiar with web development. My questions:
1- Can I develop PHP using Visual studio?
2- What is the best development setup for PHP development?
3- How can I debug PHP code?
4- Do I need a web server on my pc? If yes, is there any portable web server, where I don't need to install it?
1: There's a plugin, but probably isn't the best option.
2: That's arbitrary, PHPStorm is popular, another one is Eclipse PDT.
3: Using XDebug, or just by googling any error you get. Remember to setup the right debug settings.
4: That's convenient yes. Xampp (platform independent) or Wamp (Windows) are the most common options. Another one is Nginx.