Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions - Free

[xane]

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/

Has anyone tried any of these ?

I've been told the Visual Web Developer is comparable to Frontpage, unfortunately I downloaded and installed it and it screwed up my system a treat, luckily I had created a restore point, but I still had to reinstall a few programs.

I think this was related to .NET Framework 2.0, which installs with it.

They are beta, but they are free.

 

[Shovel]

These are final versions now, and are free for the first year. You just follow a hyperlink to get a license key. I think they're gonna be $50 after November next year.

Basically, it's Visual Studio 2005 without the team-collaboration features and (I suspect) probably some of the more hard-core 'stuff'. As far as I can tell though, for coding individual projects you can't go wrong with them. And it's all .NET 2.0, which is nice. I'll be writing my final year project application using the C# Express version (and SQL Server 2005 Express, just as soon as I confirm the databases are redistributable without the user needing to download 50 megs of SQL Server to run it).

Visual Web Developer like Frontpage? Errr...
VWD is for producing ASP.NET based web applications, it's not really an HTML editor. The deal is basically this: ASP.NET 2.0 is *much* better at producing valid HTML than ASP.NET 1.1 was, but it ultimately still sucks a bit.

*However*, if you're aware of this flaw, and avoid using the supplied Web Forms controls and SessionState techniques and build the HTML or XHTML structures yourself (like you would using PHP or suchlike), you should find that it's absolutely fine (actually, this is much the same rule as applied to any WYSIWYG web editor this year).

Also, VWD is massive overkill if you just want to build a handful of static pages or something small-scale. It's also useless to you if you want to work in a language other than C# or VB.net.

ASP.NET is really best suited to larger scale work, especially if you're integrating with existing Windows-based systems. And of course you need a Windows Server to deploy on to.