How can I debug PHP in IIS?

Question

I'm starting to move some sites to WordPress hosted in IIS7 using PHP 5.3 & FastCGI. I'm quickly finding that while the core of WordPress seems to work just fine out of the box, there are a number of plugins that have issues running in IIS and I'd like to be able to debug them, fix them, and submit patches.

The only solution I've found is to run WordPress in Apache on Windows to debug, but the issues appear to be related to how IIS & FastCGI work with PHP and not so much from being on Windows. I've looked at both Expression Web 3 and Aptana Studio 1.5 but could not find a way to do this with either tool.

Is there any ways to debug WordPress (or PHP in general) running under FastCGI on IIS7? What tools are needed, and specific steps would be appreciated.

Answer 1

XDebug is a very very good tool for debugging PHP.

If you are using an IDE like Netbeans, XDebug allows you to run your PHP code on a local server in step-through mode, with break points and variable watches. Very very powerful and extremely easy to use.