How to use PHP with Visual Studio

By default VS is not made to run PHP, but you can do it with extensions:

You can install an add-on with the extension manager, PHP Tools for Visual Studio.

If you want to install it inside VS, go to Tools > Extension Manager > Online Gallery > Search for PHP where you will find PHP Tools (the link above) for Visual Studio. Also you have VS.Php for Visual Studio. Both are not free.

You have also a cool PHP compiler called Phalanger:

If I'm not mistaken, the code you wrote above is JavaScript (jQuery) and not PHP.

If you want cool standalone IDE's for PHP: (Free)

• Netbeans: https://netbeans.org/downloads/start.html?platform=windows&lang=en&option=php
• Eclipse: http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/packages/eclipse-php-developers/heliosr

Maybe we should help you with a big misunderstanding on your side first: PHP is (like ASP.NET or whatever you used to far) a server side language while javascript is client side.

This means that PHP will run on your webserver and create a HTML page dynamically which is then sent to the browser. Javascript in turn is embedded (either directly or as a referenced file) into this HTML page and runs in the browser.

Maybe you can now understand why your approach so far could never work out.

Try Visual Studio Code. Very good support for PHP and other languages directly or via extensions. It can not replace power of Visual Studio but it is powerful addition to Visual Studio. And you can run it on all OS (Windows, Linux, Mac...).

https://code.visualstudio.com/