When Written: Oct 2008
In a previous article I had a moan about the lack of intellisense support for classic Asp in Visual Studio. Well no sooner had the deadline expired but Visual Studio 2008 SP1 appeared and this has restored ASP intellisense as well as improved CSS intellisense. I am grateful to readers Richard Taylor and Myke Black who not only pointed this out but in the case of Myke also suggested the excellent Visual Web Developer 2008 Express product, it being available at that oh so tempting price point of free, and with service pack 1 installed it does do intellisense for classic ASP code as well as the full version of Visual Studio. The Expressions suite still does not support ASP, however, and so the pressure to move any future development to ASP.NET or PHP is there.
Visual Studio Service Pack 1 is a big download, and if like me you have beta versions installed on your machine, you have to uninstall all these first. It took me some time to get VS SP1 installed but in the end after I uninstalled everything listed in Scott Guthrie’s blog, Visual Studio went on a treat. My copy of Visual Studio will still not show any sort of code hinting or intellisense for classic ASP no matter what I do, but I will persevere and should I get it to work, I will report back.
One of the great advantages with using a slightly older technology like Classic ASP is the familiarity and the rapid development that can be achieved. Particularly using tools and add-ins that one has acquired or bought over the years. Now with Dreamweaver’s lack of support for .NET2 and the announcement that the major extension builders for it, WebAssist will not be producing anything for .NET nor in fact classic ASP and cold fusion, but supporting PHP only now, the web development community is being split even further into two camps. This is despite Visual Studio’s ability to support a pile of languages such as PHP, jQuery and many others. It seems that .NET is just too difficult to support for these other tools, or is it that the Microsoft tools are just getting too good and the others are retreating? We shall see.
Article by: Mark Newton
Published in: Mark Newton