Visual Web Developer vs. Visual Studio 2005

It will be interesting to see how Microsoft's strategy of offering low price/enterprise IDEs for .NET 2.0 will play out. Of late I've been showing Visual Web Developer (low price) to several audiences and this weekend I did my first Visual Studio 2005 (enterprise) training, as you can create ASP.NET web sites with both it's a good question what features VWD doesn't have, up until today I hadn't seen a short list. Rob Howard is a regional director who used to by part of the ASP.NET team. Rob is co-author of ASP.NET v.2.0 - The Beta Version. Well, in the corrections of the book I finally found such list, that I reproduce here:

  1. Source Code Control Support. While you can use the standalone VSS tools they don't integrate directly into VWD.
  2. Class Library Project Support. You can build classes with VWD, but from the IDE you can't build them into standalone assemblies.
  3. Web Compilation Support. While you get intellisense and compilation checking at F5/Ctlr-F5, you cannot pre-compile sites for deployment without source files.
  4. Mobile Web Support. There is no WYSIWYG support for mobile controls.
  5. Accessibility Checker. ASP.NET will emit 508/ECAG markup, but VWD doesn't include the built-in accessibility checker for the IDE.
  6. Localisation Support. ASP.NET provides runtime support for localization, but VWD doesn't provide IDE support for resource stripping to easily localize sites.
  7. Unit Testing Support. Both class and web project unit testing are only supported in Visual Studio 2005.
  8. Class Designer. This is only available in Visual Studio 2005.
  9. Web Load Testing. This is only available in Visual Studio 2005.
  10. Remote Debugging. This is only available in Visual Studio 2005.

IMHO, for a business ASP.NET developer, the notable omissions are 2. and, especially, 7., well may be 4. and 9. too, what do you think?

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