[thelist] skeptical about the "benefits" of .NET (VisualStudio,Visual Basic, and ASP)

[Ken Schaefer]

: -----Original Message-----
: From: thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org [mailto:thelist-
: bounces at lists.evolt.org] On Behalf Of Chris Hardy
: Subject: RE: [thelist] skeptical about the "benefits" of .NET
: (VisualStudio,Visual Basic, and ASP)
: 
: re: presentation layer - I imagine that MS used the FrontPage html
: generator in the .NET engine (it would make sense wouldn't it?) 
: the output looks on par anyways.  There are some presentation 
: layer coding practices that are a little crazy-making 
: if you evaluate your work by web standards.

I believe that what happens is both applications used the Trident rendering
engine that comes with mshtml.dll (coincidently, this is what Internet
Explorer uses as well). Whilst people say that IE is integrated into the OS,
it's probably more correct to say that there are a bunch of core services
(e.g. a design time surface) that are coded by the IE team, but available to
all apps.

The problem with this .dll is that it returns a whole bunch of rubbish to the
app. It's also badly formatted, and so the app needs to "reformat" it. That
said, I think Frontpage 2003 does a good job of handling this - leagues ahead
of previous versions.

I would not use Visual Studio for doing pure design work - use your preferred
HTML editor. However if you need to work with .NET classes, then some kind of
.NET aware IDE (either Visual Studio, or Dreamweaver MX) is probably going to
be better value (as you get access to Intellisense, property pages etc). 

If OP prefers something that gives you cleaner HTML, you might want to try
the beta of Visual Web Developer 2005 (one of the versions of Visual Studio
2005 that's coming out later this year). Do be aware that it primarily
targets .NET v2.0 and it's a beta product (maybe run it inside a virtual
machine to test for suitability): 
http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/

Cheers
Ken