XAMPP is a cross-platform Apache HTTP server distribution containing MariaDB (fork of MySQL) database, PHP, and Perl. The word "XAMPP" is an acronym and it seems there is no official explaning of if, but we can safely assume that "X" stands for "cross", meaning "cross-platform", A would be Apache, M is MariaDB. While first P would be short for PHP and second P for Pearl or reversed?
Visual Studio Code and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL): those represent a great couple for developing a PHP application such as Laravel inside a virtual Linux environment. This tutorial describes installation of WSL (version 2) on Windows 10, setting up PHP with debugging capabilities in there, creating a Laravel project, and getting your VS Code ready to debug the PHP project in WSL.
When IIS Express isn’t sufficient for your development needs and you need to get an full-fledged IIS web server for your PHP project, you can now configure it in matter of few clicks.
Even tho PHP 8 was officially released on November 26, 2020, you could already use its new syntax with PHP Tools before that date, and install PHP from sources. Now the release is available for the Windows platform and it can be installed on your development machine in an easy way.
If you read our Award Winning article (well, my Mom liked it) about how to use PHP Tools with Visual Studio, you'll understand that we didn't want to make the good people who enjoy using Visual Studio Code with PHP Tools left out, so we want to demonstrate how to debug your code on that platform.
