Recently I tried out VS.Php 2.7 for Visual Studio 2005 which appeared to be a really slick Visual Studio extension which allowed for color coded PHP editing with intellisense, auto-complete, and integrated language help.

Overall it was a pretty pretty cool product if you wanted to work on PHP with visual studio. There was just one exception... Visual studio would crash several times a day when this component was installed and editing PHP files.

After doing some research a better solution for editing (and debugging) PHP in a Windows IDE is Aptana Studio 1.5. Aptana takes a bit longer to start up, but once it is running it is much faster than Visual Studio, and no crashes when editing PHP code. It is free, and it has great debugger integration for PHP, including support for debugging PHP running in Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Server).

VS.Php 2.7 for Visual Studio 2005 was created by JCX Software Corp.

I have been using Windows Server 2008 for several months, along with HyperV running several virtual machines. Today when I arrived at work, I found that my virtual machines weren't running, and were missing.

When I tried to re-add the virtual machines, I received the following error from Hyper-V.

Failed to add device 'Microsoft Synthetic Ethernet Port'.

After receiving this message I tried a reboot, then tried adding the virtual machine again, with no network and still received the same message.

Failed to add device 'Microsoft Synthetic Ethernet Port'.

Two things that had changed were
1. Trend Micro Antivirus had been installed yesterday.
2. A windows update for Internet Explorer was installed and forced a reboot last night (thanks Microsoft).

The first thing that I tried after the initial reboot was to uninstall Trend Micro Antivirus, and attempt to add the missing virtual machines back in again. It worked. Trend Micro was indeed the culprit.


They say that computers and software are there to make us more productive, but thats not the case today. 1 hour wasted tracking down the issue doing the reboots, and reconfiguring the virtual machines.

I hope that someone finds this posting and uninstalls their Trend Micro antivirus before they waste a bunch of time trying other things.