On the CodeWall.co.uk blog Dan Englishby has shared his list of what he considers the "must have" extensions for the Visual Studio Code editor for PHP developers to help make them more productive and make their jobs simpler.

Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code is completely competent with the PHP language. It’s something that shocked me personally when it was released as I really didn’t expect it to come prepared for PHP developers. But yep, it is a valid development environment for PHP, and of course, there are plenty of extensions to be used with it.

In this article, I will go through the best available extensions that can be installed with your version of VSCode. With this list of essential extensions you can configure your Visual Studio Code IDE into a wizardry-code-environment.

His list includes tools for a wide range of tooling and helpful functions including:

• PHP Intellisense
• DocBlocker
• PHP Getter & Setter
• Custom Snippet Pack
• PHP Files Extension

Each item in the list has a link to the extension in the VSCode marketplace and a brief description of what it can do.

Caleb Porzio has put together a post for those out there either considering using Microsoft's Visual Code Studio IDE or just want to see what it would be like for PHP development. In his post he shares his setup since making the switch over to the IDE full time.

I’m using VS Code as my primary editor these days and am really digging it. My setup is by no means perfect, but I've made lots of little tweaks along the way that you may benefit from.

I've set up these nifty categories, so feel free to jump around and try stuff out as you go, or come back later and use it as a reference.

Categories in the post include useful extensions, "must-have" settings, changing up the look and useful keybindings. There's plenty of links, output examples, screenshots of the IDE and the configuration options you'll need to change to update the settings to match his.

On the Delicious Brains site there's a tutorial that shows you how to use Microsoft's VS Code IDE for PHP development. They focus more specifically on WordPress development but a lot of the environment setup could be used for any PHP project.

If you keep up with the many different text editors and developer tools available, you may have heard of a newer IDE called Visual Studio Code. VS Code is a free, open source code editor that is lightweight like Sublime Text, but offers many of the same features as bigger IDEs like PhpStorm or WebStorm.

In this article I’ll review some features and extensions of VS Code that I really appreciate, and show you how to make the most out of it for WordPress and general web development.

The tutorial walks you through the installation and integration of various PHP development tools including an "intellisense" extension, XDebug support, a Javascript debugger and a few other helpful extensions. Install instructions are included as well as screenshots/screencasts showing the end result.