Dreamweaver vs. Visual Studio

[Jeremy Williams]

I am currently working for a large organization and am their lead web designer
/ application developer. In the past I haved developed applications using
classic asp and php. (This is where my comfort zone is.) In order for me to
accomplish the needs of this organization, I have come to the conclusion that I
am going to need to pursue asp.net more aggressively. More specifically, I am
going to need to take advantage of some "web services" in order to connect
their many data wherehouses, servers, etc. to the web. I believe this will
necesitate my employing a programmer as I'm sure some of what needs to be done
is out of my range of expertise.

At any rate, I have come to learn that many folks who utilize asp.net work
primarily (or even exclusively) in MS Visual Studio. In fact, this
organization's information services department uses Visual Studio. My
background and comfort zone is in Dreamweaver. Do you think I need to invest
in Visual Studio or do you think I can accomplish what I need to using
Dreamweaver? I have heard some people discuss that Dreamweaver is an excellent
application for the overall design of the site and that Visual Studio is used
to perform more of the "down in the trenches" coding on the "web services" end?
If this is true, are both of these programs compatible? Meaning, can you
bring up the different pages in both Dreamweaver and Visual Studio without
having any formating or coding conflicts?

I would appreciate any comments or enlightenment that any of you experienced
masters can give me.

[=-^@-@^-=]

Yes, you should get Visual Studio as it's much better at ASP.NET than
Dreamweaver. DW's strength is in making the page look pretty, and Visual
Studio gives it brains.

I do about 90% of my development in ASP.NET and the rest in DW.

Post by Jeremy Williams
I am currently working for a large organization and am their lead web designer
/ application developer. In the past I haved developed applications using
classic asp and php. (This is where my comfort zone is.) In order for me to
accomplish the needs of this organization, I have come to the conclusion that I
am going to need to pursue asp.net more aggressively. More specifically, I am
going to need to take advantage of some "web services" in order to connect
their many data wherehouses, servers, etc. to the web. I believe this will
necesitate my employing a programmer as I'm sure some of what needs to be done
is out of my range of expertise.
At any rate, I have come to learn that many folks who utilize asp.net work
primarily (or even exclusively) in MS Visual Studio. In fact, this
organization's information services department uses Visual Studio. My
background and comfort zone is in Dreamweaver. Do you think I need to invest
in Visual Studio or do you think I can accomplish what I need to using
Dreamweaver? I have heard some people discuss that Dreamweaver is an excellent
application for the overall design of the site and that Visual Studio is used
to perform more of the "down in the trenches" coding on the "web services" end?
If this is true, are both of these programs compatible? Meaning, can you
bring up the different pages in both Dreamweaver and Visual Studio without
having any formating or coding conflicts?
I would appreciate any comments or enlightenment that any of you experienced
masters can give me.

[darrel]

Post by Jeremy Williams
At any rate, I have come to learn that many folks who utilize asp.net work
primarily (or even exclusively) in MS Visual Studio.

Yep.

Post by Jeremy Williams
Do you think I need to invest
in Visual Studio or do you think I can accomplish what I need to using
Dreamweaver?

If you are going to do ASP.net stuff seriously, and there's ANY possibility
you will be working with others on the same code, then you really need to
bite the bullet and embrace VS.net as well.

Post by Jeremy Williams
Meaning, can you
bring up the different pages in both Dreamweaver and Visual Studio without
having any formating or coding conflicts?

If you use VS.net, you use the codebehind model in asp.net, which means much
of the page logic is then kept in a separate file. DW doesn't 'get' that
and, as such, you probably won't be using DW to directly edit aspx pages.
That said, you can certainly still use DW to create HTML and THEN use vs.net
to do the rest.

-Darrel