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Integrating FrontPage and VS .NET

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I hadn't anticipated posting again so soon, but I wanted to comment on Saurabh Nandu's comment about Visual Studio .NET and FrontPage.

Although both products provide Web development functionality, the two are not intended to be competing products.  FrontPage is largely still a design application.  WYSIWYG support in FrontPage is better because that was what FrontPage was originally designed to do.  VS .NET is largely a development environment and provides a larger set of tools and features for working with ASP.NET code.

Our expected scenario for integration between FrontPage and Visual Studio .NET focuses on teams of designers and developers working on the same sites.  Developers write and modify code for Web apps, services, etc. in Visual Studio, and designers pull the projects into FrontPage to design the pages.

FrontPage 2003 made huge strides to integrate with Visual Studio .NET, but we all agree that it doesn't have quite the level of support that people want and need.  I can't tell you what the development team is planning for the next release, but I can tell you that we are all aware of the problems with FrontPage and VS .NET integration.

It's true that expected scenarios are not always the real scenarios.  People often use FrontPage in ways that we didn't anticipate, and FrontPage and VS integration is much more complex than I've stated above.  To help developers who are working with VS and FrontPage, I published on the FrontPage Developer Portal a reprint of a chapter from Jim Buyen's book FrontPage 2003 Inside Out:  Using FrontPage 2003 and Visual Studio .NET Together.  However, I have read in some newsgroup posts that developers want more information than what is contained in this chapter.  To help accommodate this need, we have scheduled an article focused on working with ASP.NET controls in FrontPage, which should be available within the next month or so, and I'm considering writing an additional article based on our targeted scenario (described above).

I have to be honest, I haven't spent a great deal of time working on the integration of VS and FrontPage, so I have no words of wisdom for you ... yet.  I will say that I've created very simple Web apps in Visual Studio and pulled them into FrontPage and modified their designs.  I admit that I haven't gone through the full process of publishing the app into my site, but on the surface, the integration with FrontPage for my simple app was relatively seamless and straight-forward.

I think, however, that many Web developers want to replace Visual Studio with FrontPage when working with ASP.NET.  In this case, developers can write inline ASP.NET code, but I don't believe FrontPage provides great IntelliSense for ASP.NET code. Again, the logic behind this is largely because FrontPage was not attempting to replace or compete with Visual Studio but was intending to complement it with the excellent design tools for which FrontPage is so well known.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 22, 2004
    "VS .NET is largely a development environment and provides a larger set of tools and features for working with ASP.NET code." - would not completely agree with this statement. I believe the goal behind the integrated VS.NET IDE, highlights the important fact that VS.NET now needs to serve different audiences including Architects, designer, developer and testers.

    And even in the case you mentioned that VS.NET is geared towards developers, but that does not mean they provide developers with a shoddy designer, right?
    And if you would think like a competitor of VS.NET for a moment, you would see that there is a large customer base of developers who are not happy with VS.NET’s designer, wouldn’t that be an opportunity that you should capitalize upon?


  • Anonymous
    April 24, 2004
    Frontpage? Visual Studio?
  • Anonymous
    April 24, 2004
    Frontpage? Visual Studio?