Okay, I know there are a lot of lovers of this IDE, but seriously it's been a royal PIA to use for this PHP work!

Maybe it's just because I've been using a top of the line IDE for the past 6 years and am use to things just being where you expect them to be and just working (like finding preferences under 'Options' instead of under 'Window' - WTF???). Around 80% of my learning PHP time is soley focused doing hand to hand combat with Eclipse on an hourly basis which has made the experience VERY frustrating.   Now I will admit that probably 50% of my complaints are just whining due to not being familiar with the tool - but the other 50% is purely frustration from the lack of intuitiveness in the tool and the amount of hoops you have to jump through to do the simplest things (like changing the start up page...instead of right-click -> Set As Start Up Page I have to open the hit the properties of the page, go to the run/debug settings, highlight the page again (even though I just right-clicked on it two steps ago), change the 'file' to location of the page that I want to be the start up page (oh and turn off auto-generate because for some reason Eclipse can't figure out that my project folder isn't part of URL even though in my build settings isn't absent from the build path). 

Oh, then there's the constant pop-ups of some java error which is the equivelent of the Windows HRESULT pop-up message (at least one an hour) - absolutely frustrating and serves no purpose to me what so ever.   Do me a fricken favor and do like Microsoft, log it, and then occassional just request to send the errors to the server - keep me out of the loop!!!

Does anyone out there who is familiar with working with VSTS have a product that they can recommend?  Is Zend Studio really all it's cracked up to be?   Is the cheap version that apparently plugs into Eclipse any good or is the only decent one the $1200 one?  I've said it before, and I serioulsy mean this, if the OS anti-Microsoft people ever want to convert the masses they need MUCH better tool sets; the tool set has been the single most limiting and frustrating part of their world.   Seriously, I'll drop $250 today if there is a decent one that allows me to get away from this frustration.

Any good developer (who's doing this for a living and not just a geek who's trying to make them feel superior to others by showing how well they can work with a complicated tool that others can't), knows it's all about the ease of the tool sets and will spend a few hours worth of labor in a heart-beat to save them hour upon hour of stupid frustrations like these.

Oh ditto with MySQL admin tool - that thing is a joke compared to SQL Server Management Studio - like working in the stone ages.   If you know of good admin tools for MySQL, pass those along too!