HAL-PC Web Technolgies SIG

What It Is:

Microsoft's freeware ASP,NET editor is sort of a very, very, lite Visual Studio.NET. I the surface the iterface is similar. Toolbox on the left, Workspace & Properties on the right. The formatting toolbar will look like just about every other MS application.

The main workspace has 4 tabs along the bottom for Design (the WYSIWYG view), HTML to let you see the HTML code and Code which gives shows you the VB.NET code. The fourth choice is "All" . This view shows you what your finished page will look like if you were to look at it in Notepad or other text editor. Note: this is the only view that shows actual line numbers, etc.

Benefits over using a text editor.

First, other than using a general text editor I don't know of any other ASP.NET specific editor. Even the latest version of Homesite+ doesn't contain any ASP.NET tools.(See note below) Any code created when you use it in "Design" view will be written in XHTML mode. If you want to write HTML 4 or lower code you must write in HTML view. I will note that some changes I made in HTML mode were over-written when I switched between HTML view and Design view. The code I wrote was XHTML code so it should not have been changed. I had added a <thead> and changed some of the default <td> tags to <th> tags for the table below and it took several tries before Web Matrix allowed the changes to stay.

Web Matrix Web Server

Runs on Windows 2000 or Windows XP - both versions. It will not run on Windows 98 or lower.

If you are running Windows XP Home and do not want to learn and test ASP.NET on your local computer, get Web Matrix. It comes with a built-in testing server that will let you test your code without IIS. Which means you have to upgrade to XP Pro.

Even if you are running Windows XP Pro or Windows 2000 you may want to consider using the built-in web server instead of installing IIS if you are only going to be using it to test your ASP.NET pages and you are concerned about security since  theWeb Matrix Web Server can accept incoming requests only from the localhost (IP address 127.0.0.1). So you don't open up your computer to Web server attacks like Code Red while running the Web Matrix Web Server. This limitation also means you can't host a live Web site from your computer using the Web Matrix so if you need or want to run other services then you will need a more full featured web server.

Uploading You Files:

Unlike Visual Studio.NET you don't need FrontPage extensions on your webserver to upload your ASP.NET files. With Web Matrix you can FTP your files directly. For many projects this makes more sense. Especially when you are in the testing and developing phase on a developmental server and only want to see how one page works in the "real" world and not just on the lite testing server that comes with Web Matrix.

What It Isn't:

It isn't Visual Studio.NET nor is it Dreamweaver MX. There is no autocomplete to help you learn the code and syntax. You drag and drop the various predefined elements onto the page in Design view. Events can be added easily to buttons but it will not write more than minimal code for you. Example, double clicking on a button will give you the framework of a function that looks like this:

Sub Button1_Click(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) 
        End Sub 
        

There are a few prewritten bits of code that come built-into Web Matrix. These are:

Code Inlcuded

Sample Email Code

Select Data Method Insert Data Method Update Data Method Delete Data Method Email

Build a MailMessage Dim mailMessage As System.Web.Mail.MailMessage = New System.Web.Mail.MailMessage mailMessage.From = "someone@example.com" mailMessage.To = "someone@example.com" mailMessage.Subject = "Email Subject" mailMessage.BodyFormat = System.Web.Mail.MailFormat.Text ' TODO: Set the mailMessage.Body property System.Web.Mail.SmtpMail.SmtpServer = "localhost" System.Web.Mail.SmtpMail.Send(mailMessage)

All of the Data Method items are designed to work only with SQL or MDSE. If you are using a different database you will need to create you own or find someone else's snippets.

Snippets are bits of code stored in xml format, which makes them easily transportable. This built-in extensibility should result in a large amount of snippets being publicly available quickly and mostly free.

Web Matrix Resources

ASP.NETPRO
Has a good article on how to create your first ASP.NET webpage (not the Hello World page used the the Web Matrix tutorial). It also goes into more depth on the code classes than this review goes covers.

Snippets Resources

Flaws.com - Show us your snippets
How to use snippets and a few @import snippets to start off your collection.

Homesite Note: While Homesite does not have any built-in ASP.NET scripting tools it is an extensible tool and 3rd parties have added some ASP.NET snippets for Homesite version 4 & above at http://www.wilk4.com/asp4hs/aspdotnet4hs.htm

Page we created during the SIG meeting - code view