I guess I inadvertently asked a technical question when what I had was more of a business objective, which was, to catch all errors up front similar to the way we get them when we build a C# project.
If anybody knows differently , please let me know, but at this point I think it is not possible to run a lint/build step on all the php files in your php project.
However, if you run phpunit from a command line, it does seem to at least exercise all your tests and catch errors that you may be missing from the visual representation of your tests.
Hope that helps somebody.
And to throw in another testimony for Devsense - I'm working side by side (one screen VisualStudio/Devsense, visual green light tests , the other screen linux server, VSCode , two terminals, running Sebastian's phpinit) , and I find the Devsense side development experience incomparably better. My code ends up being lean php that runs either in windows or linux ... when I hit f5 on the entire project then the other guy's linux code might cause windows to barf, but I only want to clear a set of unit tests and get my stuff to the server, which is a little narrower requirement than some of you might have. Again, hope that helps.