Dreamweaver/Visual Studio compatibility

[Mickey]

Anyone know of any compatibility issues between DW and Visual Studio? I've
been told me that editing in DW (I'm using CS3 on one computer and 8 on
another) can cause compilation errors because of some invisible data that DW
inserts. I'd like to use DW for minor updates as I get more familiar with
VS. Am I safe to do that?

Thanks,
Mickey

 

[Ken Fine]

Hi, there Mickey. I started on DW UltraDev (whose server-side functionality
was eventually absorbed into DW.)

If you are going to work in/learn ASP.NET, my general advice is to use and
learn Visual Studio. VS.NET sort of crushes DW in terms of being a
functional and productive IDE, except for one notable exception that I will
detail below.

If you use DW to do minor updates to ASCX/ASPX pages, it should not cause
harm. If you use DW to edit .CS codebehind files, this too will work, but it
is somewhat foolish to do so. IDE has rich intellisense capabilities you
will learn to know and love, and it will make you very powerful.

The biggest issue I have with VS.NET as an IDE, honestly, is that for
small-scale website work where you're just bashing in a few changes and
updating a page or code, there is not a simple and easy key binding to
upload the change. With Dreamweaver, you simply hit "Control-Shift-U" and
it's uploaded. VS.NET doesn't have quite the same notion of "sites" that DW
does, and you either have to copy the file yourself or go through the kludge
of the VS.NET website tool. Really, really annoying. A program manager I met
at Tech Ed last summer hinted that there will be major improvements to the
VS.NET deployment in its next version but offered no specifics. I hope
something like this gets put in as an option. VS.NET may not have been
developed as a low-skill website editor but that's how many are using it
these days.

In all other ways Visual Studio is really quite an awesome tool and I think
you will enjoy working with it.

Cheers,
-KF

 

[Mickey]

Thanks for your thorough answer, Ken! Much appreciated. I look forward to
learning my way around VS. I'll be taking my first real plunge today so I'll
probably be back with more questions.

Mickey

 

[Cowboy \(Gregory A. Beamer\)]

Not really. What people are probably talking about is the fact that
Dreamweaver adds references to its own libraries when you do certain actions
in Dreamweaver.

I was a huge Dreamweaver advocate when MS offered FrontPage. I am now using
Expression Web for design. This shift was more because of EW's CSS features,
which outshine Dreamweaver. In either case, I used Visual Studio for coding
and the other tool for design (DW or EW).