Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition

ToolKit

LANGUAGES:VB.NET | C#

ASP.NET VERSIONS:2.0

Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition

Take a One-Year Test Driveof the Premier Web Development IDE

By Ken McNamee

At the time of this writing, Visual Studio 2005 in allof its various incarnations has just been released to the developer communitywith a tremendous amount of fanfare. Everyone is rejoicing: developers,testers, project managers, Microsoft shareholders, etc. Visual Studio 2005Professional and Team Suite (or Team Sweet, as I like to think of it) are bothaimed at the enterprise/corporate cubicle-dwelling developer for whom sourcecontrol and issue tracking integration are absolutely essential to get the jobdone. The Team editions of Visual Studio 2005 also include tools aimed atsoftware testers, project leads, and architects instead of being purelydeveloper-focused.

In addition to Professional and Team Suite, the othermember and lowest commercial version on the Visual Studio family tree is theStandard edition. Although, I must say, I m hard-pressed to see who thisversion is really aimed at because it hardly has any features not included inthe version that is the focus of this article: Visual Web Developer 2005 ExpressEdition (Visual Web Developer Express). Visual Web Developer Express is part ofthe family of Visual Studio Express tools that also includes C#, Visual Basic,C++, and J# Express. The key difference is that all of those tools are onlycapable of Windows Forms development, while Visual Web Developer Express is ...well, you know. However, Visual Web Developer Express only supports C# andVB.NET, so all of you C++ and J# Web developers are simply out of luck ... butyou already knew that.

Installation

Installing Visual Web Developer Express was a littletricky for me. I ve had to do a lot of installing and uninstalling of betaversions of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 over the past year, which isakin to eating double-cheeseburgers for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for a year:Eventually it s going to catch up to you. So I elected to do the computerequivalent of a triple-bypass with a transfusion and reinstall Windows XP,Office 2003, Visual Studio.NET 2003, SQL Server 2000, etc. which got mylaptop back to a pretty typical development state. Under these conditions I hadno problems installing Visual Web Developer Express.

I should also note that Microsoft has kindly madeavailable a beta uninstall tool for people like me who have been far too eagerto throw caution to the wind and install the very latest beta bits. You canfind this tool at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=47598.Unfortunately, it didn t work for me, but I think my machine was too far gone.I ve heard from other developers for whom it worked fine, so I would definitelyrecommend running it as your first step if you ve been installing any .NET betasoftware.

The installation of Visual Web Developer Express couldn tbe easier. Simply go to http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/vwd/download/and download the 2MB setup file and run it. As you can see in Figure 1, thesetup application will examine your computer and only download the componentsthat you choose or that are necessary to complete the installation. The MSDNExpress Library is a must, but SQL Server Express is optional (in my opinion)because I d recommend that you instead get your hands on SQL Server 2005Developer Edition if you can. It has all the features of the Enterprise editionand is only $49. You also get the very excellent SQL Server Management Console,which I will be writing more about in the coming months.

Figure 1: The Visual Web DeveloperExpress installation process is super simple, and gives you the option to alsoinstall SQL Server Express and the MSDN Library in one step.

Features

The good news is that as far as Web development goes VisualWeb Developer Express is incredibly full-featured and doesn t cut any corners whenit comes to IDE support for all the great new features and controls containedin ASP.NET 2.0 (as you can see from the Add New Item dialog box displayed inFigure 2). Visual Web Developer Express provides full support for such thingsas master pages, Web services, SQL Server Express integration, XML/XSLT, mobiledevices, and ASP.NET themes, just to name a few.

Figure 2: Visual Web DeveloperExpress might be a little limited on enterprise features, but it still providesfull support for all the great new features and controls contained in ASP.NET2.0.

I won t be going into all the features of Visual WebDeveloper Express here because they are also contained in the bigger VisualStudio 2005, whose feature-set I d like to devote more extensive articles to inthe future rather than a few measly sentences now. But, suffice to say that VisualWeb Developer Express provides almost everything you need for ASP.NET Webdevelopment, such as:

Figure 3: The Visual Web DeveloperExpress IDE provides a very helpful start page, which provides many shortcutsfor common tasks and links to help pages, community forums, and articles forthose new to ASP.NET 2.0.

Figure 4: Visual Web DeveloperExpress now supports flexible development and deployment scenarios withproject-less, local file system Web sites, as well as local IIS and remote FTPor FrontPage Web sites.

And if you find that Visual Web Developer Express justdoesn t quite cut it and you need to upgrade to Standard, Professional, or TeamSuite, you should be pleased to know that all of your files and projects are100% compatible across all Visual Studio 2005 versions.

Conclusion

Amazingly, Microsoft has decided to provide all the VisualStudio Express products free of charge for one year, and then only charge $49after that. The folks in Redmondappear to be targeting the enthusiast/hobbyist/student crowd with theseproducts, but I m sure the hope is to also get those developers hooked onVisual Studio to the point where they re willing to upgrade to some of the morefull-featured versions. Whatever the plan, all I know is that Visual WebDeveloper Express is probably the best free tool I ve written about since Ibegan this column more than three years ago. In terms of development features,ease of deployment, and upward compatibility with its bigger Visual Studio 2005cousins, Visual Web Developer Express should be a great fit for many ASP.NETdevelopers.

Ken McNamee is aSenior Software Developer with Vertigo Software, Inc., a leading provider ofsoftware development and consulting services on the Microsoft platform. Priorto this, he led a team of developers in re-architecting the Home ShoppingNetwork s e-commerce site, http://www.HSN.com,to 100% ASP.NET with C#. Readers can contact him at [email protected].