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LaraBABA's avatar

Help with fine tuning visual studio for Laravel please

Hello,

I am trying to compare the auto-complete of phpstorm vs visual studio as I would like to stay with visual studio. The problem is that visual studio is not working too well for auto-completion and I would like to know why please.

In my case, I have installed this: https://github.com/braintree/braintree_php

To integrate this library, I need to add this to my serviceprovider boot file: \Braintree_Configuration::environment(env(BRAINTREE_ENV)); \Braintree_Configuration::merchantId(env(BRAINTREE_MERCHANT_ID)); \Braintree_Configuration::publicKey(env(BRAINTREE_PUBLIC_KEY)); \Braintree_Configuration::privateKey(env(BRAINTREE_PRIVATE_KEY));

Here is the test. In PHP storm, when I type: \Braintree_

Automatically, all the classes and functions of this library are popping up in the dropdown menu.

Under visual studio, I get nothing at all or completely unrelated classes.

How do fix this, please?

Thank you.

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5 replies
LaraBABA's avatar

Thanks Nakov, yes I already watched the serie but it looks like Visual Studio has its own limitations, sad as I loved its GUI.

Nakov's avatar

@boubou that's a limitation to all the text editors and the advantage of the IDE's. There are plugins but will never be as powerful as the IDE I believe.

An IDE comes with its own costs as well, it uses much more memory from your computer :)

LaraBABA's avatar

Yes I understand, and this is the difficult part when you do not code every day nor make much money out of it... I am not a full-time coder and perhaps code once every 2 weeks. I am not sure I should be paying for PHPStorm...That's why I was trying to get the best out of Visual studio.

jove's avatar

You can get PhpStorm for free if the project is open source / or you go to a school. I had it free for a while while in school then ended up paying for it. But then again I use it almost every day at work and as a hobby.

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