Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Microsoft gets serious about Web development
I've just put my Javascript Bible up for sale. A great language to be sure, but I'm tired of stuffing about writing code that works differently on various platforms and browsers.And my ASP 3.0 Professional book. No more. Microsoft have lowered the bar for active, data-driven website development. It's almost as easy as drop and drag. OK. You still have to know how HTML works and how a database is put together and be able to write code without tripping over your feet. Not all that difficult, and there are any number of books to help you along. But the bottom line for Visual Studio.NET is that Microsoft has worked out that the Internet is where widely distributed applications are happening, and it's no good delivering a development environment aimed at the desktop and having a second rate product for the Web. Make no mistake, you can still use Visual Studio to develop superb desktop applications, and I purely love some of the goodies they have included, like being able to set transparency of objects on the fly - you want a screen that gently shimmers into view, or a form that you can see through to the information below, it's easy - lots of goodies like that. The development environment is just wonderful. It makes writing and testing code a snap. But this is Visual Studio built from the ground up around the Internet in general and the Web in particular. The biggest change is that instead of having HTML and code mixed up together on the same page, a real nightmare to maintain, you now have two pages, one to lay out your web page exactly as you want, another for the "code-behind" where you set down the code. At its most basic, you have a button on one page, and the code that handles the button click on another that the user never sees. And remember how I have my JavaScript Bible up for sale? The controls and the code in .NET work for any browser, and you don't have to mix Javascript client-side and VBscript server-side any more. The framework handles all that for you and different code gets sent to different browsers automatically. A *huge* saving in development time and the elimination of a maintenance nightmare. In fact, it doesn't matter what language you use to write your code in. Visual Basic, C++, Java, Microsoft's new C# (which is best described as C++ without pointers), or any of the dozens of old and new languages being made available for the environment. There's stacks more to say about Visual Studio.NET, but I don't have the space here. Buy it and try it - with the rebate it's inexpensive, or you can try the whole product for 60 days by asking Microsoft for an eval version - it's on their website somewhere - not too hard to find. My opinion of VS.NET is that it's a bold new advance on the previous version, one that is the result of a lot of consultation with real-life developers, and one that is designed for Web development. Serious web development. It also lowers the bar for developing sophisticated web pages. Makes web coding an order of magnitude easier. There is going to be a huge cottage industry of website design based around this product, and a smart cookie can turn out good websites for small business and community groups at the rate of one a night and a few on weekends. Seriously, you can make back the price of this product in a few hours, it's that good. Let others struggle with Perl and cross-browser issues and maintenance tangles - this is the fast track right here.
Rating: - This is a good product
It provides for a set of objects that are common for the three languages, when dealing with windows. The only reason I do not give it 5 stars is because in the C++ realm you cannot visually place components on a form in .NET, but must do it manually. The IDE has one particular component that stands out in my mind. You can take methods in your source listing and actually close or hide the code for these methods that you do not want to see. This is much like the Windows Explorer Program, when dealing with drives and folders. It allows you to easily find and concentrate on the code that is important to you at the moment. Overall it is a fine product and Microsoft has done, in my opinion, a good job.
Rating: - .NET .GET
This studio is leagues beyond the last. Microsoft is easing the burden of developers by simplifying distributed application development using .NET. Sure, for instance, you can go in and manually write the low level COM interface connectors if you prefer to have the "stick shift" control and specific performance attributes etc., or you can rely on the built in functionality of .NET and speed the development process. It seems that with this platform there is a bit of a learning curve even for the most experienced developers because of the great differences. But the online help is dynamic and useful when you get stuck on something. Visual Basic is not Visual Basic now. They seemed to have completely renovated the way VB works. The Common language Runtime (CLR) makes it possible to create solutions by interweaving any of the languages included with the studio. I believe there is a way to import 3rd party or future MS designed languages as well. So if one language is better at a specific task, then you can switch to it. The integrated development environment (IDE) is meant to maximize developer productivity. In using it, I haven't experienced the contrary. I must mention that I do like the flexibility of working on web applications in .NET. You can use a grid layout like a form builder, or the flow layout like a web page editor. I noticed a couple of funny things so far, but not worth mentioning. It takes some getting used to, but this is certainly worth it.
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