Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express makes website management easy

Filed under: Developer, Internet, Windows, Microsoft, Freeware

Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express makes website management easy

by Adam Maras Jun 24th 2008

Our friends over at Microsoft have a knack for hiding really cool stuff right under our noses, and they certainly didn't deviate from this policy with their Visual Studio Express Edition line of products. Included with the programming and database tools that would make the layman cringe is an interesting gem called Visual Web Developer Express Edition.

While the other Express Edition products focus on programming and application development, Visual Web Developer provides a hybrid set of tools; its versatile HTML and CSS editing tools are paired with the power of ASP.NET to allow users to quickly build web applications. However, what a lot of people don't know about Visual Web Developer is that the ASP.NET development tools can be ignored, turning it into a very impressive website editor.

Visual Web Developer includes Visual Studio's powerful WYSIWYG page editor and CSS style builder functions. Also provided is Microsoft's developer sanity-preserving IntelliSense technology, which makes editing HTML and CSS a breeze by providing immediate access to things like common markup and style attributes and values. However, one of our favorite features of Visual Web Developer is that you can point it to an FTP server, and edit your website right on your web server without worrying about uploading changes or using a separate FTP client. In fact, Visual Web Developer can, for the most part, replace your external FTP client, because the Solution Explorer allows you to upload and manipulate files right in your editing environment.

All of the Visual Studio Express Editions are free of charge; they don't do quite as much as Visual Studio, but they are worth looking at if you're interested in getting started with software or web development.

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Kamal said 12:12PM on 6-24-2008

I have been using VWB Express Edition since its 2005 edition and it is very nice. If you do any database related stuff to SQL, you just HAVE TO check out LINQ (new with 2008 ver)!

Check out http://www.asp.net for video tutorials.

James said 12:54PM on 6-24-2008

Cue Linux trolls flaming about how much better Emacs is than "this garbage" in 3... 2... 1...

webdtc said 3:32PM on 6-24-2008

I'm glad you posted this. VWD has been around since 2005 and it's a great free IDE. A nice price especially since people are always complaining that MS is always out for $$. Of course MS is hoping people use this and get hooked on asp.net development.

It's actually pretty lightweight and very easy to use. One of the new features of VWD2008 is JavaScript intellisense.

And, if you are an asp.net developer or interested in asp.net development you can get your entire development environment for free. VWD2008 has a built in personal web server to test your applications so you don't need to set up your own server for testing. You can also download SQL Server Express for databases.

Alan Silcott said 5:56PM on 7-01-2008

If you head over to http://asp.net they have a ton of videos to teach you how to master this program. Good stuff

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