Freedom Creations

Posts Tagged ‘Windows’

Another great Web Development IDE, however for the Windows platform only, is Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Express. Why am I mentioning it? Because it’s FREE. You just have to register here to get a registration number and after that you’re all set.  Here, I must say, bravo Microsoft! Job well done.

If you ask me, what’s the best free replacement of Adobe Dreamweaver on the Windows platform?  My answer is, Visual Web Developer 2008 Express.  If you are a Web Developer starting out, honestly, I don’t see any reason why you would dish out $399 to get Dreamweaver.  Actually, reading this blog, you’ll find out that you never have to purchase any expensive software to do web development.

Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Express

Anyways, here are some highlights of Visual Web Developer (VWD).  I encourage you to install it to see all the features of VWD.  It is easy to install.  Just download the setup program and run it.

VWD has a Design, Split and Source View to edit your pages.  These views work very well just like in Dreamweaver.  My favorite feature is the code autocompletion or intellisense (as Microsoft likes to call it).   When you preview (Start Debugging) a page in the browser, VWD creates a virtual instance of a web server using ASP.NET.  This works well especially when you want to preview .aspx pages and you have not setup a website under IIS.   VWD allows you to create websites/web applications directly on IIS, FTP or a local folder.

Although Visual Web Developer is geared more for Web Development such as ASP.NET, it is a great IDE for Web Design as well.  If you are primarily a Windows user and on a budget,  I cannot recommend more other than Visual Web Developer 2008 Express.

Which Operating System (OS) do you go with? Well, I am not going to argue which is best. Each one has its advantages. Our main concern is web design, so I am just going to focus on the features that each OS has to offer in that respect.

Windows 2000/XP/Vista – With Windows you can pretty much run any of the web development tools that are out there; free and non-free. All the major browsers are supported on Windows, like Internet Explorer, Firefox, and lately Safari. Also all the cross-platform plug-ins are supported, like Flash, Java, and now Silverlight. Although you can run Apache/MySQL/PHP on a Windows machine, it is not the greatest experience. So when it comes to developing Content Management Services (CMS), I do not recommend doing it on Windows.

MAC OS – On the MAC you can pretty much run a lot of free web design tools and it supports all the major retail applications. All the major browsers are supported except for Internet Explorer 6.0 and above. There is an IE version for the MAC but it only goes up to version 5.2.3 and it is a horrible browser. I do not recommend installing on a MAC as a matter of fact I would remove it if you have it. There is an open source project called IES4OSX (requires WINE) that will allow you to run more recent versions of IE on your MAC but it’s not 100% full-proof. MAC supports all multimedia and programming platforms including Silverlight. MAC has also good support for Apache/MySQL/PHP; therefore a good platform for CMS development. Read the rest of this entry »