Poor Mans .Net
While the debate rages about VSTS pricing, I wanted to talk about kind of the other end of the spectrum, the Express SKUs.
I’ve been using Visual Web Developer Express and Visual C# Express for
a few months now, with Beta 1 and now Beta 2. VWD is the shit.
Its awesome, when my trial ran up for Beta 1, I tried to go back to
Dreamweaver, but I only lasted a few days before I installed Beta 2 and
a new copy of VWD. The intellisense for editing C#/VB in a script
block is great, it makes it much easier to develop some lightweight
pages.
As for C# Express, this is a great product too. The intellisense
is much improved over VS 2003 and there are some little interface
enhancements that I like better, like when you type the closing bracket
‘{’ it highlights each end of the brackets in a very dark, easy-to-see
way. The only think that I think C# Express is missing, is the ability
to attach to a running process. I use that feature all the time
in VS 2003, but alas, that functionality isn’t available in the Express
editions.
The best part about the Express products: $50 apiece. For $100
you can get each of these products, and be well on your way to
developing some great software. Between these two and SVN, I’m happy as a clam 
darrell said,
Wrote on July 14, 2005 @ 5:55 am
I love some Subversion!
btompkins said,
Wrote on July 14, 2005 @ 6:04 am
Power to the ppl!
breichelt said,
Wrote on July 14, 2005 @ 6:57 am
So, does anyone know why the word ’shit’ was replaced with *** ? I did a search on Sahil’s blog and he gets to have the word in there, why cant I?!?!
breichelt said,
Wrote on July 14, 2005 @ 7:31 am
UGH! Okay, my posts and my comments are filtering select words, but I didnt see any setting in the admin for them, but I’ll keep digging.
btompkins said,
Wrote on July 14, 2005 @ 7:44 am
Hi Ben.
I turned off the dirty word filter.
You can now post all the fucking bad language you want! I hope no one has a shit fit over this, but hey, fuck em! They can carry their asses!
breichelt said,
Wrote on July 14, 2005 @ 8:06 am
Brendan, you da fucking man! Thanks!
Anonymous said,
Wrote on July 14, 2005 @ 7:32 pm
So do you have to have two different IDEs to have a webproject with associated class libraries?
Can you use the c#Express IDE to create ClassLibrary “webprojects” you debug directly with Cassini? I just switched to Cassini recently, and gotta say, I’m lovin’ the ability to debug with Firefox, not worrying about permissions, and have my site operate as a webroot as opposed to a virtual directory.
breichelt said,
Wrote on July 14, 2005 @ 8:43 pm
Sam, thats I usually develop my web projects anyways, I used VS 2003 to develop the class libraries and Dreamweaver for the html. Now I’ll use VWD for the html, and its got better support for xhtml too, with better intellisense for css and c#, so I love it. I’ve never heard of Cassini though, what is it?
Anonymous said,
Wrote on July 15, 2005 @ 11:05 am
It’s a webserver that runs in process. You treat a Class Library as if it’s a WebProject, change the debug mode in the configuration to Program, give the path and command line switches Cassini needs, and hit F5 to build/run-Cassini/debug-in-any-broswer-you-want.