David
Wed Jun 29 16:52:36 CDT 2005
Well, comparing Dreamweaver against Visual InterDev or even Visual Studio 6
is not exactly a fair comparison. Both Visual Studio 6 and Visual InterDev
are more than three versions from the latest release of current tools.
Dreamweaver MX is a flagship product just versioned last year. And comparing
5+ year old UI to current standards is rather odd...
I asked members on the Visual Web Developer product team, and they indicated
that there are two things that you must distingish in what you want to do:
- Designer surface - layout and design the web pages, graphics, thumbnails,
CSS, etc
- Code behind surface - the dynamic code invoked by parts of the layout to
do interesting work
Although Visual Web Developer does not force .Net development when running
it (it has a simple check for .Net Framework being installed, but it's
pretty easy to work around), you'd be missing out on most of the features
related to code behind (that uses .Net), though you'd still have basic
VID-level Intellisense support for ASP. Since ASP is not structured, there's
not much more you can do without introducing proprietary organizational
constructs. As for the designer surface, you will have WYSIWYG composition
of HTML/ASP pages comparable to FrontPage, but when it comes to graphic
widgets, image manipulation, etc, FrontPage would be better suited.
Now, one has to note that Visual Web Developer is free - $0 to download and
no real strings attached - and primarily addresses the lack of an ASP.Net
development environment. It isn't targetting ASP, though the feature
coat-tail is certainly long enough to make ASP more comfortable.
It costs nothing to try out, and as with all of Visual Studio, there is a
great deal of product transparency and support -- the product team members
actively listen to anyone in the community (free to join), definitely made
many product changes according to community feedback, as well as solicit and
investigate any issues reported by the community to improve product quality.
So, you are definitely not isolated nor alone (unless you want to be), and
if you want a better product, voice your opinions because they will be
heard. Otherwise, you are just silently griping and hoping for psychics to
read your mind... and we all know how effective that can be.
Visual Web Developer landing page:
http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/vwd/default.aspx
Visual Studio 2005 landing page:
http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/
Note the open solicitation for product feedback, suggestions, Q&A, and issue
reporting/tracking. You can be as involved as you want to be.
--
//David
IIS
http://blogs.msdn.com/David.Wang
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
//
"Axel" <realraven2000@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1119866787.347609.44570@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
Hi David,
thanks for the information. I am using the mentioned versions of
software because these are the ones my colleagues use and I do not want
to introduce versioning problems. IIS 5 is simply installed on our test
server and Visual Studio 6 is the version that everyone at the office
uses. However we also have a copy of VS 2005 lying around AFAIK nobody
has dared to install this one yet. The problem with anything after VS6
is that nobody knows how this will support backwards compatibility
since the focus has shifted so much to DOT NET which we are currently
not using.
> If you think Visual Interdev and IISAdmin look cool
actually, no! If I had a choice for web developement I would totally
prefer to use dreamweaver MX, but we do not have licenses for this at
work.
If you look at the Visual Studio product line, the only version 6 IDE I
would consider "mature" is the one for Visual C++. VB and InterDev have
a lot usability issues, starting from the way screen space is wasted,
dockability and non cohesive ness; If you compare it to DW Visual
Interdev is not a great product. But I use it because there is licenses
and (some) support at the office.
I might consider trying out Visual Web Developer if you could clarify
that I am not forced to use DOT NET technology for my development.
regards
Axel