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