Introduction to Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition
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.