Zend.com's Studio 5
 

Anybody have a chance to checkout 21 day professonal version yet??

Zend Studio 5 delivers a comprehensive set of editing, debugging, analysis,
optimization and database tools. Zend Studio 5 speeds development cycles and simplifies complex projects.

I'm still using v4, but will be upgrading next week in the hope it's more stable.

Does Zend really help? I use a regular notepad, and it's fine...but this seems interesting...

As of ZS4, that means in between crashes, bugs, and lack of features compared to other IDEs (at least other Java IDEs).

Using Zend IDE to develop in PHP is a god-send. I've vastly cut down my development time since switching to Zend.

Some useful features that help when writing vB add-ons:

The project inspector shows you a list of all classes / functions within your project. In this case, the vb folder is added as a project folder, so it catalogs all of vB's classes and functions.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v7...ar_classes.jpg http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v7..._functions.jpg

Another useful feature is inline error checking - in this case, I've forgotten to put the semi-colon on the end of the previous line:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v7...ine_errors.jpg

It also saves time by trying to auto-complete variable, class and function names for you - eg, for functions:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v7...uggestions.jpg

It also lets you know what the arguments for a function are, and the order and defaults:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v7...ment_hints.jpg

It's got various other very handy functions as well. For example, I could right click on the "can_moderate" text above, and chose "Go To Declaration" and it would open up the file that can_moderate() is defined in, and take me to the correct line in that file.

Other features include a tool that Analyzes your code and spots things like un-used variables, variables that are only used once (probably typos), things like using a single = instead of == (eg, if (x = 1) instead of if (x == 1))

I've been using it for a little over 2 years now, and nowadays, I couldn't live without it :)