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Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition is part of the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 family, and is the best development tool for building data driven web applications with ASP.NET 2.0. As part of the Express family, Visual Web Developer provides a seamless upgrade path to Visual Studio Standard, Professional, and Team System.

Visual Web Developer is tuned to the specific needs of the Web developer through a new Web profile that exposes a menu and window layout optimized for Web development. The environment includes a best-of-breed HTML source editor, an improved visual page designer, a new project system, better support for working with data, and full XHTML standards support.  Collectively, these features enable you to develop data-driven Web applications faster and easier than ever before. Below we’ll dive in and explore a few of the many Web development improvements coming with Visual Web Developer.

Better Source Code Editing

Visual Web Developer has an improved HTML source editor which enables you to write and modify your pages faster. The source editor provides full Intellisense throughout your files and has new features for navigating and validating your markup.

Intellisense Everywhere
Intellisense — the popup code hints which appear while you type — has a dramatic impact on your productivity as a developer. While support for Intellisense in Visual Studio .NET 2003 is excellent today, support for Intellisense in Visual Web Developer gets even better.

In Visual Web Developer, Intellisense pops up everywhere. For example, you can take full advantage of Intellisense within the script blocks in single file ASP.NET pages. In addition, Visual Web Developer also supports Intellisense for ASP.NET Page Directives and for inline CSS style attributes within a page.
HTML Formatting Options
Visual Web Developer enables you to precisely control the format of all HTML and ASP.NET Server Control markup generated using the WYSIWYG designer.  You can now configure the tag casing, attribute quotation, indention style and word wrap characteristics of every html or server control tag in a page.  You can set these formatting options as defaults for all markup, as well as optionally override each formatting option on a per tag/control basis.  This provides you with the flexibility to fully control exactly how you want your markup to be generated.

HTML format settings can be exported and imported from Visual Web Developer to enable markup style standardization across multiple developers on a team.  Visual Web Developer also enables developers to easily apply HTML formatting rules to existing markup source (to handle those cases when you need to update existing HTML source with new formatting rules).

Tag Navigator
The HTML source editor within Visual Web Developer ships with a new �Tag Navigator� feature that enables developers to easily track their location and navigate within a complicated HTML document. The Tag Navigator displays the current “path” within the source of an HTML page by displaying a list of all the HTML tags which contain the tag where your cursor is currently located. Clicking on any of the nodes enables developers to optionally change the source level selection, and quickly move up and down a deep HTML hierarchy.

Imagine, for example, that you are editing the source of an HTML page with multiple nested HTML tables. Editing nested tables can be challenging since it is easy to get lost within the jumble of nested table rows and cells. However, by taking advantage of the Tag Navigator, you can avoid getting lost since the Tag Navigator continuously displays your current path within the hierarchy of table elements.

Tag Outlining
Tag Outlining enables you to work more effectively with large HTML documents. With Tag Outlining, you can right-click any HTML tag in the source editor and select Collapse Tag to hide the entire contents of the tag. Collapsing different regions of the HTML source code contained in a page makes it easier to focus on the particular region of the page which you need to edit.

ASP.NET is a programming framework built on the common language runtime that can be used on a server to build powerful Web applications. The first version of ASP.NET offered several important advantages over previous Web development models. ASP.NET 2.0 improves upon that foundation by adding support for several new and exciting features in the areas of developer productivity, administration and management, extensibility, and performance:
Developer Productivity
ASP.NET 2.0 encapsulates common Web tasks into application services and controls that can be easily reused across web sites. With these basic building blocks, many scenarios can now be implemented with far less custom code than was required in previous versions. With ASP.NET 2.0 it is possible to significantly reduce the amount of code and concepts necessary to build common scenarios on the web.

* New Server Controls. ASP.NET 2.0 introduces many new server controls that enable powerful declarative support for data access, login security, wizard navigation, menus, treeviews, portals, and more. Many of these controls take advantage of core application services in ASP.NET for scenarios like data access, membership and roles, and personalization. Some of the new families of controls in ASP.NET 2.0 are described below.

o Data Controls. Data access in ASP.NET 2.0 can be accomplished completely declaratively (no code) using the new data-bound and data source controls. There are new data source controls to represent different data backends such as SQL database, business objects, and XML, and there are new data-bound controls for rendering common UI for data, such as gridview, detailsview, and formview..

o Navigation Controls. The navigation controls provide common UI for navigating between pages in your site, such as treeview, menu, and sitemappath. These controls use the site navigation service in ASP.NET 2.0 to retrieve the custom structure you have defined for your site.

o Login Controls. The new login controls provide the building blocks to add authentication and authorization-based UI to your site, such as login forms, create user forms, password retrieval, and custom UI for logged in users or roles. These controls use the built-in membership and role services in ASP.NET 2.0 to interact with the user and role information defined for your site.

o Web Part Controls. Web parts are an exciting new family of controls that enable you to add rich, personalized content and layout to your site, as well as the ability to edit that content and layout directly from your application pages. These controls rely on the personalization services in ASP.NET 2.0 to provide a unique experience for each user in your application.