.NET using DreamWeaver vs VisualStudio

[DoubleV]

we are switching to .NET from PHP, so this is all new to me.
I was told by somebody to be careful with VS.NET because of the spurious code that Microsoft products add to the page headers. how bad is it? This guy have used DreamWeaver to write his .NET pages (he said he used DW and hand coded some stuff). Our needs are quite simplistic (mostly just quering a db and displaying the results) and right now we don't own neither DW nor VS.
It seems like DW was enough for the person I spoke with to get his project done (which is almost identical to mine), yet I am not sure how DW works with ASP.NET.
is there an advantage to using DW for the .NET pages?

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[tigerjade]

I can give you one disadvantage with DW that I've run into several times; it gets cranky with XML. I don't know a better way to explain it than that. When we'd edit or create an XML file with DW, sometimes we had to resave the file in another editor (Notepad worked fine) for the XML file to work in the application. This didn't happen every time, or most of the time, but definitely enough to sour me on DW permanently. And since the chances are quite good you'll use XML with .Net at some point, you might also run into this little weirdness too.


hth

tigerjade

"Always code as if the person who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live." -- Martin Golding

 

[SkydivingSteve]

For simple stuff, I'd stick to DW. I've found it a fab package to work with for web design (although I haven't used it for .Net programming). The guy that told you about spurious code from MS was probably thinking of FrontPage, not Visual Studio. VS is a pretty hardcore development environment. It also makes you use 'code-behind' which you'll probably not want to do if you're not looking to dig deep into ASP.Net.

You might also want to think about looking at Web Matrix which comes free with the .Net framework. It's not too complicated and it works OK for me for programming ASP.Net. And it's free!

 

[rrhandle]

We have dealt with the same dilemma for the past 8 months. Having been a team who used DW and TextPad for all our ASP application, we chose to go with VS, and ONLY VS. Here is why:

1)
If you have ever programmed in Visual Basic, you know the termendous advantage of using such a tool. Much easier to control the code, and Intellisense is just too nice to do without.

2)
You will never know .NET the way you knew ASP. There is just too much. VS does so much of the coding for you. The controls take some time to learn, but once learned you will not want to do things the old way. I must have cursed those things out for a few months until I got the hang of them.

3)
Using DW and VS was a nightmare for us; we could not take advantage of all VS had to offer. DW will force you to write much of the code yourself; thus, taking time and increasing the chances for coding errors.

4)
One disadvantage of VS 2003 is no support for controlling page layout like DW templates do. We resorted to include files :-( Fortunately, VS 2005 does offer this feature.

5)
VS allows you to create your own controls. We only took advantage of this once when we created a custom class for our session variables. Work Great! You don't have to remember the names of all your session variables, they appear right in the intellisense.

So, there you have it. That was our experience.

 

[DoubleV]

how is VS with the HTML code?
say, right now I have pages that I have written. I'll have to convert them from php to asp.net. I want to keep the html code structure, just change the backend.

--------------------------------------------------
Goals are dreams with deadlines
-------------------------------------

http://www.nimlok.com