Reviews
Review: Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition
Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition Beta 1
pricing TBD
Microsoft
Redmond, Washington
lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/vwd/
In some ways Visual Web Developer is the most interesting of the new
line of "Express" products being previewed now by Microsoft, because it
doesn't have a direct analog in the Visual Studio .NET 2003 lineup. And
yet, the notion of a dedicated IDE for Web development is hardly new at
Microsoft; they tried this with Visual InterDev a few years ago, and
there are certainly eerie similarities here if you remember that far
back. There's the same notion that every bit of Web development can be
done in the IDE, that everything from data access to page design should
be handled by easy tools. On the other hand, Microsoft has learned a few
things along the way as well. VWD, for example, does not appear to
butcher HTML that you've taken the time to lay out the way that you want
it.
Of course, "Web development" here really means ASP.NET development. You
have your choice of Visual Basic, C#, or Visual J# as a coding language.
Once you build a new project, you'll be in an IDE that is clearly Visual
Studio with some incremental development (and the inevitable new color
scheme). One nice new touch is the "Common Tasks" menu that flies out
from controls in design view. For a grid, for example, you can use this
menu to enable sorting or paging with a single click, or to change data
bindings. We are clearly moving towards a world where every pixel in the
IDE has a separate meaning, but so long as they're useful I don't really
mind this.
An interesting addition to previous ASP.NET releases is the built-in
support for Web Parts. These are the sort of moveable, customizable
pieces of functionality you find in portals like SharePoint. While I'm
not convinced that such a thing is really so common that it needs to be
built into the base product, it's certainly an accomplishment to have
made it available in a relatively easy design mode. Also new is support
for Master Pages - design templates that let you enforce consistent look
and feel on pages across a site without undue pain.
There's also been a lot of work here on data binding, with a dizzying
array of options for binding just by plopping things on a page, writing
classes to handle binding, using Wizards to hook things up to a data
source, and so on. I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, most
developers will be able to find a data binding design strategy that
suits them here. On the other, this part of the product seems likely to
be overwhelming to the target "hobbyist" audience.
There are certainly things not to like here (though who knows whether
they'll be in the final shipping code). For example, the dependency on
folders having the special names "Code" and "Data" to hold particular
types of components strikes me as daffy. And, of course, it's a beta
product, so some things won't work right and you can't deploy any sites
you build on the Internet. But VWD is definitely mature enough to start
exploring right now. The interesting question will be whether the
release version succeeds in attracting new Web developers to the
Microsoft tool stack instead of the open-source alternatives.