In the PHP version you can send 'true' in the last parameter, but the default is 'false'. The following algorithm is equivalent to the default PHP's hash function when passing 'sha256' as the first parameter:
public static string GetSha256FromString(string strData)
{
var message = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(strData);
SHA256Managed hashString = new SHA256Managed();
string hex = "";
var hashValue = hashString.ComputeHash(message);
foreach (byte x in hashValue)
{
hex += String.Format("{0:x2}", x);
}
return hex;
}