The Peachpie project is finally at a point where it can be used for real world purposes and applications. This article will show some more advanced interoperability options that are now available for you to try.

What you can expect in this article

As you know, Peachpie is a PHP compiler and runtime for .NET and .NET Core, built on top of the Microsoft Roslyn compiler platform. We have our own Visual Studio Code extension, which simplifies working with Peachpie and allows you to do so in a very comfortable IDE.

In this article we will cover:

1. Compiling PHP to .NET Core

2. Debugging PHP functions

3. Using PHP functions in C# and vice versa

4. Inheriting a PHP class in C#

Compiling PHP to .NET Core

Let’s get started. If you haven’t already, please install the Peachpie for VSCode extension. We will open our sample app, which you can find on our samples GitHub repo, and load everything into VSCode. You will almost certainly have to restore the NuGet packages by typing the command dotnet restore :

project.json file, which defines how dotnet should compile. What’s interesting here are the build options, where we set ‘compilerName’ to ‘php’ and whatever has to be compiled to ‘**/*.php’. With this setting, we tell dotnet to compile our entire PHP code using the PHP compiler, which is Peachpie, as described in the “tools” section of project.json .

Debugging PHP functions

Our entering script is index.php , which includes two files, creates an object and calls a method. Take note of the fact that we are not running PHP; we are running PHP code compiled to .DLL. We can now debug the project by pressing F5:

The program stops at the first breakpoint, and this is where the fun begins. Thanks to Peachpie, we now have all the power of .NET – debugging, inspecting variables, the call stack, and if we were to use the full Visual Studio, we can even move the yellow marker to another statement. Naturally, we can also step through the code.

Regular expressions

As we step through the code, we can of course inspect variables, parameters and properties of objects and arrays. For example, if we execute the function for matching regular expressions, it returns an array:

As we continue executing the program, notice how debugger displays the value of object “User” in curly brackets. In fact, what you see here is the result of the magic __tostring function:

Interoperating between PHP & C#

Let’s call the PHP method “authenticate” by stepping into. What if we were to use this whole PHP library in C#? What if we wanted to use or re-implement some of its PHP functions in C#? Or how about if we’d like to extend the PHP class with a C# derivative? Since Peachpie compiles the whole PHP code to standard .NET, we can do all of this quite straightforwardly.

To demonstrate these interoperability features, We prepared a small C# app, which you can also find in our GitHub samples. To make it the default startup project in VS Code, we have to edit the launch.json and tasks.json configurations first. Instead of ‘phplib’ we specify ‘csharpapp’ as both the startup project and the build project. Now dotnet builds the C# app and VSCode starts it upon pressing F5:

Moreover, this works both ways. Let’s inject the C# lambda function through the Peachpie API into the so-called PHP context:

Instead of the regular expression, we just make sure the .NET Uri object can be created and gets an absolute URL.

Inheriting a PHP class in C#

Another curiosity is the option of having a C# class inherit a PHP class. This is possible because the PHP class looks like any other .NET type to the C# compiler:

PHP classes have generated a CLR constructor, whose signature has a special first parameter as an addition. In order to override it, we have to know the signature. Since the PHP project is compiled, we can take advantage of ILSpy, which decompiles the compiled .DLL file back to C#. We’ll use it to see the C# representation of compiled PHP code and get the constructor signature:

We can browse through the .NET types and functions built from PHP code, our User class and its fields and methods. We can directly instantiate our C# class, which inherits the one defined in PHP. We just need to pass the first additional parameter, which binds the object to the context.

The implication here is that we can now use a much more advanced .NET user authentication, for example.

Conclusion

Hopefully you enjoyed this tutorial on some of the more advanced interoperability options available with Peachpie. In this article we showed how to compile PHP to .NET Core with VSCode, how to debug PHP, how the both-way interoperability between C# and PHP looks like, and the possibility of C# inheriting a PHP class.

You can also watch the corresponding video tutorial and please make sure to subscribe and follow us on Twitter or GitHub for more interesting material in the coming months.