I’ve been watching Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers pop up everywhere as the glue between AI agents and the real world. The pitch is simple: expose tools and data through a standard protocol and suddenly your AI agents can plan trips, analyze documents, query databases, or in my case, work with maps. MCP clicked for me because it’s opinionated where it matters and unopinionated where it shouldn’t. It standardizes how clients and servers talk, but it doesn’t box you into a single stack. Think of it as the USB-C of AI integrations: one cable, many devices.  

The first time I connected Visual Studio Code with GitHub Copilot, I expected party tricks. I got something closer to a new way of working. It wasn’t that code appeared by magic. It was that the little frictions, like the boilerplate, the glue code, the tests I knew I should write but kept postponing, stopped dominating my day. VS Code had already been my editor of choice for its ergonomics and extensibility; Copilot turned that editor into a cockpit where intention became motion. This post is my field report: what I actually run, how I prompt, where it saves time, and where I still slow down and think.

This post describes how to set up, run, and debug PHP code with Visual Studio Code running on Windows.

What do we need?

Compared to some other popular programming languages for the Web, PHP is missing some tools, so I created a shopping list to make the experience more complete.

Basically what we need is:

• the PHP runtime itself,
• a modern code editor with syntax highlighting,
• a debugger connected to our code editor,
• and a (development) webserver.

Runtime (PHP)

We start with the PHP runtime. The PHP runtime will pars en execute our .php files and outputs the HTML (or anything you want) back to you.

There are many libraries and services to generate PDF files for asp.net core web applications. There are excellent commercial solutions out there, but if you need a free solution, it gets harder. Some libraries are hard to use, or others are limited in functionality. I need a free, easy to use, and quick solution to generate PDF files on an Azure Web App.

Can a View retrun a PDF?

What I need is a View that returns a PDF and not HTML what it usually does. The beauty of using a standard View is that I can use my web and asp.net core knowledge to design the View. In this case, I need to generate invoices.