Using Microsoft® Visual Interdev®

Some recommended HTML editors are Microsoft® FrontPage®, Macromedia® Dreamweaver®, and Adobe® Go Live®. The ideal solution for ASP development is Microsoft® Visual Interdev®. Visual Interdev gives you a tremendous degree of control over your ASP scripts and database support, including SQL Server.

Microsoft Visual InterDev 6.0 is the latest version of the leading tool for developers building highly dynamic and interactive Web sites and applications. It goes beyond the popular Microsoft® FrontPage® 2000, in that this is a programmers’ tool. FrontPage was designed as a Web authoring tool for non-programmers.

Visual InterDev is a member of the Microsoft Visual Tools family, appearing very similar to other Microsoft visual development tools like Visual C++, Visual J++, Visual FoxPro, and Visual Basic. Because most Web sites are created by teams of people, including programmers and non-programmers, Visual InterDev and Microsoft FrontPage do interoperate so that teams of people with various skills can work together on the same site. The below illustration shows the Visual Interdev working environment.

 

Visual Interdev does include a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor so that you can create Web content in a friendly user environment (GUI) similar to FrontPage. This includes three tabs; Design, Source, and Quick View as illustrated below:

 

However, we do not recommend working in the Design environment for complex scripting and database dependant Web pages. The power and performance of Visual Interdev is realized in the scripting and database capabilities NOT the WYSIWYG capabilities!

The first time you launch Visual Interdev, you will be asked for a Project to identify your work with. You can choose between the New Web Project or the Sample ASP Wizard as illustrated below:

 

You can launch your project on your local PC or your Web site on the server by specifying a location in the Location field. Once you begin your project, you are ready to unleash the powerful capabilities of Microsoft Visual Interdev. For more information on this product, please refer to the Visual Interdev site by Microsoft.