What ASP software do you use ?

Hi,

This has probably been discussed a 1000 times but I couldn't seem to find anything.

I've been using Dreamweaver to develop ASP apps with an Access backend.

I now need to develop a more advanced scheduling website and I think I'll probably need something a bit more advanced than dreamweaver. I usually program Access in VB but need to convert my application to an online one.

What development software do you guys use and recommend ?

Thanks,

Pharkas

Notepad.

TextPad!!

Notepad of course. pure, plain text.
for classic ASP you really don't need something more "powerful", it would only confuse you and cause you to be dependant on others at some point.
for ASP.NET it's different story... Visual Studio .NET is the answer in this case.
you could made this thread as poll, you know...

I've written Content Management Systems and Shopping Carts in Dreamweaver. It's just code.
Like these guys said...it could be done in Notepad.

As long as you really understand what your code is doing that's fine... but I see too many cases of ppl that use the code generated by that Weaver without any slight idea what it is doing or how to change it!

WOW!!! Isn't that the TRUTH!!!

yeah, it was very hard to come up with this I know. took me years to reach this amazing conclusion...
(so we all agree that Notepad is the best? )

1st page 2000, is my tool of choice, basically a halfway house between dreamweaver and notepad. Its a bit buggy, but it has built in html reference, there was some talk of a new version being available soon (but that was 4 years ago!)

www.evrsoft.com

Gosh, do I really want to admit it??? OK I actually use front page, but honestly I never use their generated code I do actually use Front Page and despite its bad press and the fact that it will wonk up your HTML if you let it, it works very well so long as you understand how to use it for what it is good for and not use it for what it is not.

I use notepad or even the DOS edit command when I don't have other choices and for straight ASP there is absolutely no advantage to Front Page for me. But most pages are a mix of HTML, JavaScript and ASP. Front Page does a nice job of helping with the javascript end by use of their intelisense (or whatever they call it) that will give you the properties and actions for an object as you type along. It also is helpful for putting things where I want them on the screen in HTML. I must confess I started learning ASP before I started learning HTML. I get pretty lazy around HTML and often work with the Idea that I'll make it work, let someone else make it pretty.

If used a couple of others over the years. Dreamweaver back at version 4 (I think) I liked it, but didn't really know what I was doing at the time I was using it so I never got the full benefit of it. I've also used topstyle pro. I like topstyle and have been considering moving that direction completely. It is nicer in the ASP side in that it actually color codes comments and strings etc... in the ASP code like Front Page does for HTML. It's preview can also link into your web server so that the preview can actually display the ASP results. The W3C validator is nice and the main reason I purchased it (CSS) it does a nice job with. I also recently tried Coffee Cups HTML editor and was unimpressed. I think they have some good ideas (especially a side bar for commonly used code snippets) but I felt overall that they weren't ready for prime time.

Nothing wrong with Frontpage, I use FP often. And InterDev. And Vim. and Araneae. And others.

just wanted to comment something about Visual Studio .NET - as far as it concerns html, it's very bad. it ruins html code, making it non-xhtml and non W3C valid code - I guess nothing can be perfect eh?
example for its bad behaviour: when I add something like this in the aspx: <br /> it convert it into <BR> - it also make all attributes upper case and much more stuff.